Lights…

One of the reasons for going with such short benchwork (depth-wise) was my choice of lighting. Pretty much from the get go, I decided I wasn’t going to use flourescent or incandescent light fixtures. Especially those with 110V AC required! I didn’t want to have to buy and install a sub panel onto my electrical circuitbreaker panel for the sole purpose of running lights. Nor did I want the added height such fixtures impose.

So imagine the smile on my face when I discovered LED Strips packing some 600 surface mount bright white LED’s into five meters worth of flexible material, on eBay for not even fourty dollars including shipping!

The two reels of them arrived on Friday from Hong Kong. Cam suggested we use my DC power pack and a multimeter to test out both voltage and current draw and we are both pleased with the results.

We even setup a few strips of track at Parksville pit our test equipment on them and then taped up the strips in position and voila! We’ll need to run two or three strips for adequate lighting but I did half expect that given Timothy Horton’s layout (he also gets credit for the idea of using LED’s) uses three strips for his n scale BCR Dawson Creek sub layout.

Another unknown off my checklist. I’ll raise a drink to that!