K-line A5 headlight

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A 12 V grain of wheat should work. Just splice on to the old connector.

Pete

Thanks for the replies.  I had been trying to access Brasseur's website for a day with no luck and the phone number gave me a "no longer in service" message.  Now, however, it appears everything is working OK and I was able to place an on-line order for the headlight with wire and plug. 

I just put an LED into one of those for one of our club members.  It's much brighter than the stock headlight, and is also focused down the track so it looks like a real headlight.

Thanks, GRJ.  3mm?  5mm?  Dropping resister rating?

A 3mm LED fits perfectly into the headlight bezel.  The procedure is to reach in with a tool and push out the headlight bezel, insert the LED with leads already soldered into it, press it all the way in.  Bend the leads coming out of the LED at a 90 degree angle, then thread them into the shell and press the headlight bezel back in.  In either of the leads, put a 470 ohm resistor, and you'll have a far better looking headlight than the stock one.

One point.  You need to identify the positive side of the LED it connect to the frame ground pin of the connector, use an ohmmeter to check.  The negative lead of the LED goes to the headlight triac.

A final point.  Due to the characteristics of the triac, you will also need a .01uf capacitor (or a bit larger, I have a bunch of .022uf ones that work for me.  This goes directly across the R2LC headlight output to ground.  I solder them to the socket pins of the R2LC, it's a convenient place to pick them up.  Pins 3-4 to pins 13-14 are the two places for the capacitor.

Thanks very much for all the info, GRJ.

Good luck.

I should have taken some pictures when we were doing this yesterday.

Another consideration.  If the A5 has been upgraded, has TMCC or an EOB drop in board, if replacing the grain of wheat bulb best to up the voltage to 18 volts.  My foggy head remembers some Conventional, some with TMCC, and later an EOB drop in board was available from TAS.  Could be wrong and often.   Mike CT

The bulb sees half-wave track power running TMCC, or about 9-10 volts effective voltage.  It sees full track power running conventional.  Unless you really push things, 18V in conventional isn't likely in conventional.  The standard bulb that Lionel uses for TMCC is 12V.  The EOB drop-in board or the ERR Cruise Commander M won't affect the voltage going to the bulb, it comes directly from the R2LC.