Figures With Illumination

You could always use this guy:

If you don't mind him being 15' tall.   

I remember the article.  They used conductive paint instead of wires to get power to the LED.  For example a line for positive would be painted on one side of the arm holding the lantern and the negative on the other.  Of course you would have to be very careful to ensure these two lines never touched.  The article used the leads of the led as the lantern handle but each only touched a single line of conductive paint to complete the circuit.  Regular, non-conductive paint was then used to paint over the conductive paint.  The paint might have been the stuff used to repair car rear window defrosters; can't remember for certain.  Of course you could always just use thin wires and position the figure to hide them. 

Take the arm off and drill down the center for the wires.

Conductive paint pens seem to be the easiest way to do this.  A Google search turns up quite a few options.  Or you could buy prewired mini LEDs and paint over the wires once you get them on the figure.

Model Power has various figures painted and unpainted with lighting installed. Also try Town and Country Hobbies in NJ they have figures with lit lanterns as well. In the photo below is one from Town and Country hobbies.

Digging through my scrap books of magazine clippings, I did find one article about reshaping people figures from the December issue of the Model Railroad Craftsman magazine. In this article, Russell M. Griffin describes his techniques of making reshaping the stance and posture of people by:

> making angle cuts part way through the limbs of figures so they can be bent to a new angle and glued;

> Cutting off limbs, rotating them to a new position and gluing them back on.

How ever, I did not find anything about lighting figures, so I will get creative.

Thanks all for giving me some ideas.

I've had a load of requests for this kind of stuff, but the labor involved, compared to what people want to pay, is a losing proposition.....One of those things better left to the do-it-yourselfer or wait for Mike or Lionel to do it in China.....

For the flashlight, you might consider plastic optical fiber as used by scale modelers to light up a cigarette/cigar in diorama figures.  Fiber comes in 0.25mm, 0.5mm, etc. and runs a dime or so per foot from various hobby suppliers.  I took a ~5 ft tall figure from the RailKing Figure Set to demonstrate.  The figure is carved to drill the holes to route the fiber which is very flexible.  As shown in the insert, by heating the end of plastic fiber it will flare out to roughly twice the diameter which would be perfect to model the larger bulb/lens side of a cylindrical flashlight.  A white LED illuminates the other end of the fiber. 

If you're going to drill for fiber as indicated, you could simply run a pair of #32 wire-wrap wires through and have an LED at the end if desired.  A small chip LED can be placed almost anywhere.

Agreed...if you have the space.  The smallest hobby LEDs I've seen are the 0402 (.04" x .02") as in the link posted earlier at $3 each using #36 wire.  So if you're a scale-modeler, that's 2" in 1/48.  Yes, this is an O-Gauge forum where folks are less demanding such as the illuminated 15' tall gateman shown earlier.  Actually I'd be curious to know if the technology of the time (no LEDs) is why the gateman grew so tall!

Fiber can get you 2x or 4x smaller than this and has the additional benefit of becoming part of the model itself...such as the body of the flashlight as requested by the OP.  Another technique is to lightly sand the fiber so light leaks out the length and you can create some interesting illuminated figures such as the pencil-flame of a blow-torch lit by a blue LED.  This would make a nice complement to the flickering welder LED kit used in garages and such.

One other perhaps obvious benefit of fiber is a single LED can illuminate multiple fibers so in the case of a troop of Boy Scouts with flashlights, perhaps they all could be powered by a single LED.

As observed in another response, this kind of modeling can be labor intensive and could be made so much easier if manufacturers molded their figures to be "LED-ready" or "fiber-ready" so to speak.  That'll be the day...

That was my first thought as well.

I agree it can be smaller, but I never spend much time worrying how many LED's will be used.

Thanks all for the info. Stan2004, a special thanks for posting the Cut-Man photo.