Flickering car lights

Contact cleaner, not lenses  electrical.

Depends on the age of the car. if the roller looks dull, I have used 400 wet/dry sandpaper to buff it. Cleaner won't take off the corrosion. I like the contact cleaner on the roller pin/inside of the roller. Then a sparing amount of 10w oil, no additives.

I fix flickering car lights with LED upgrades that have storage capacitors.  Totally flicker free, better lighting, and almost no power draw.  It's very difficult to almost impossible to totally eliminate flicker of incandescent lighting in most passenger cars.

I agree with John I do the same for mine.

John, How about simple schematic?  Cap size, what you use to turn ac to dc, etc.

Here's what I use for my lighting control board that is sold through Henning's Trains.  It adjusts the current from around 5ma to 45ma, and works well with the lighting strips.

Is the track clean? To ask the obvious.

But, as gunrunner said, the flicker is pretty much with you when using old-school incandescents, barring a car-to-car tethering.  Me - I usually remove/disconnect car lighting, anyway. Partly because I use 18V command control (Bright light! Bright light!), and partly because I think that it looks kind of unreal.

But, you don't care. Get some LED's; these can look very nice, even to me.

gunrunnerjohn posted:

Here's what I use for my lighting control board that is sold through Henning's Trains.  It adjusts the current from around 5ma to 45ma, and works well with the lighting strips.

Thanks John.

gunrunnerjohn posted:

I fix flickering car lights with LED upgrades that have storage capacitors.  Totally flicker free, better lighting, and almost no power draw.  It's very difficult to almost impossible to totally eliminate flicker of incandescent lighting in most passenger cars.

John, can't you just add a capacitor in line with the lights to stop flickering? I have replaced some lights with LEDs and loving it, but if I don't want to replace all the lights, what value cap could I use? When I was at the TCA museum (on my York trip) in Strasburg, Lionel was showing new passenger cars that had capacitors to prevent flickering.

A capacitor across an AC feed does nothing for flicker, remember it charges and discharges sixty times a second.  It would also have to be a non-polarized cap.

If you added a diode and a REALLY LARGE capacitor, you can keep incandescent lights from flickering, but if you're going to add components, why not have better lighting, vastly lower power draw, and flicker-free lighting?

John,

What about using super caps like a lot of us do for the BCR knock offs?

In order to use a supercap, you'd still have to rectify the voltage to DC, in addition you need to regulate the voltage to prevent over-voltage on the supercap, they're very sensitive to any over-voltage.  You're spending more for the super-cap(s) than all the stuff to do the LED upgrade, but you are getting very few of the benefits.  Why swim upstream?  Are you just trying to prove it can be done?

That's right I forgot in locomotives the charging circuit is charging the cap.  In a passenger car it would be getting constant juice.  Not trying to prove anything really just thinking of a simple circuit design in my head.

I see very little reason to try to make high power incandescent bulbs flicker-free, it just takes too much storage capacity.  It's soooo much easier to use LED lighting and a compact power source with storage capacity.

gunrunnerjohn posted:

A capacitor across an AC feed does nothing for flicker, remember it charges and discharges sixty times a second.  It would also have to be a non-polarized cap.

If you added a diode and a REALLY LARGE capacitor, you can keep incandescent lights from flickering, but if you're going to add components, why not have better lighting, vastly lower power draw, and flicker-free lighting?

I kinda figured I would have to do that. I normally would just add a LED. That question just popped up in my head and I wanted to know what you thought about it. I just finished putting a LED in one of my GP9's for a head light. It looks good.