Wires break

By on 2009-02-22 in Models
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One thing about wiring a model – these wires always seem to have a way of breaking. It’s really annoying.

Anyway, after I set up the LED for the monoeye… Gee, didn’t I already do this post? Oh, yeah, that’s right, I had to wire the monoeye again because I broke one of the wires…

What happened was I was showing the model to someone, and wanted to show them how when you turn the head, the eye turns as well. (This is a standard feature of the kit, of course… Though adding LED wiring to the mix complicates things slightly) Anyway, it didn’t want to turn that day so I pushed it a little harder, heard a little “snap” and the LED went out. Turns out the wire ripped itself off the LED (taking the LED’s contact surface with it).

So to replace it I basically had to pull the whole monoeye assembly apart again and wire up and install a fresh LED. This time around I took a few extra measures to try to prevent something like this from happening again:

  • After the LED was installed, I filled the space around it with Aves Apoxie Paste. This will help prevent any movement of the wires from stressing the connection to the LED.
  • The holes leading from the front of the head to the back have been made larger
  • The section of wire routed through the back of the head is now looped, to provide extra slack and stress relief.

    Hopefully that will prevent things from breaking again. So far so good, anyway.

    • 3 Comment(s)

    1. Good to see it’s up and running again. On the bright side (no pun intended), I’d been hoping for an inside view of the head mod. Maybe I’ll still tackle it on my current project.

      jwaldo | 2009-02-23 | Reply

    2. Did you mean inside view of the head, or inside view of the eye part?

      For the eye part, it ain’t gonna happen. Thing’s broken enough times already. :D For the head, though, that’d be pretty simple…

      tetsujin | 2009-02-24 | Reply

    3. The eye looks simple enough to figure out. There isn’t enough room to get it wrong in there. But some shots of the way the wires are routed through the head to the body would rock. I’m already pretty darn good at breaking wires without adding moving parts to the mix.

      jwaldo | 2009-02-27 | Reply

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