Lighting an elevated structure

Would a coffee stirrer be too big ?  I have seen black ones at one of the fast food 

restaurants. 

Hobby shop brass tubing would make a good conduit and it is paintable.

they also have it in square so you could make it look like one of the stilts.

Very nice job BTW

You can by clear plastic tubing in various diameters on-line.   The ones I purchased were 3 or 4 feet in length, I don’t recall exactly.  I cut to length and painted black.  I use them to run wires between elevated sections.

Also, you could hollow out one of those building supports.

First, that is a great build. Re: the lighting, I assume the building isn’t backed up to something (another building, wall or mountain) so you could just run the wire in the back of one of the supports. Stained the same color as the supports it wouldn’t be visible. Otherwise, Evergreen and Plastruct make styrene tubing of virtually every diameter so there’s definitely one that will look good and can take the wires inside. Prime it (so paint doesn’t peel off), then paint. Maybe run it alongside or in back of one of the wooden building supports. 

Jerrman, yeah the building will actually be placed at the aisle edge of the layout between track and the aisle, so there are no forgiving opportunities to just straight-wire it in from a hillside or place a convenient shrubbery around it. At one point, I was thinking of perhaps using wiring on telephone poles heading to it... but that just led to design problems of where/how to run the telephone poles so it didnt look out of place.  

But Evergreen! THANK YOU!   I had never seen tubes that small before, so they are a brilliant resource for this project. 

The support posts are only 5mm wide (~ 3/16"), so the tube to make it look like a drain pipe should be somewhat smaller than the posts. 

How about magnet wire?  Since you will only power a couple of LEDs you can use a very fine gauge wire.  You could attach (glue?) the wire to the inside of your support legs and mount your power supply under your table.

Dan - I think that's what this wire is, but i've been unsuccessful every time i've tried to glue it.  I'm guessing there just isn't enough surface area for the glue to attach to, so I wind up gluing my fingers or whatever else i'm using and the wire acts like there's nothing there.

Make drain pipes out of brass and just energize the pipes. if the structure is wood, it'll insulate 2 of them from each other. Run the hot up one side of the building and the neutral up the other. Solder feeders to the bottom and get the bottom of the pipe close enough to the table to hide it in static grass. Inside the building, just wire up the LED by soldering them to the top of the brass wire. If you step it down under the table, you're talking about a few volts DC though the exposed wires.

Alternatively, pile junk on the deck underneath it so you can hide the wiring in a stack of junk.

In real life, such a building would have a surface-mount conduit running up one of the posts. I would model it properly. I think the suggestion of a plastic coffee stirrer is an excellent one. You should be able to fit two pieces of magnet wire into one.  You can terminate it with a small junction box at the top.

First off outstanding build, I really like your work here.  

I agree with Pete there would likely have been a conduit up a leg of the power feed was underground.  Plastic or brass tube would work well.

A second approach I have done before is drill a small hole up the center of one of the legs and run the wire up the hole in the leg.  Totally hidden.

Rich - don't have a drill long/thin enough to do the job. ...and thanks. 

Boilermaker - brass pipes....now that's a clever way to hide it in plain sight. Need to keep that one in mind.

Also does anyone know a source of machinery that i could put into the work room? 

I thought of adding a winch on the outside and a person guiding a load down to  the waiting flatbeds.

You can buy small diameter black and or gray tubing from Plastruct - TB-3. Tb-2 or -1 are plastic coated wire so no good. Simply spray the tubing with Dullcote to take the shine off and use super glue to attach to a piling.

https://plastruct.com/page/10/...mp;post_type=product

Joe

Danr posted:

How about magnet wire?  Since you will only power a couple of LEDs you can use a very fine gauge wire.  You could attach (glue?) the wire to the inside of your support legs and mount your power supply under your table.

I like Danr's idea about Magnet Wire which is a different animal than Kynar.  For the sizes in question for LED wiring in your structure, the enamel coating/insulation on magnet wire only adds about 1 mil (0.001") to the diameter of the underlying wire.  Typical Kynar insulation adds maybe 10 times that thickness.

So, for example, in photo above the underlying #34 magnet wire diameter is about 7 mils and the coating adds about 1 mil so that's only 8 mils total diameter.  The #30 Kynar is about 10 mils underlying wire plus another 10 mils of Kynar insulation so total is about 20 mils.  Obviously your #28 Kynar will be a bit thicker...say 25 mils overall.

The reddish-brown coating for the magnet wire is very common and might blend in without painting because it's so thin and hence probably not noticeable.  Magnet wire can be tricky to work with since you must remove the coating - either by meticulous/careful scraping using a hobby knife or preferably by "burning" it off with a soldering iron.  Of course the biggest practical issue is where to get magnet wire in small lengths (a few feet in your case).  As shown it typically comes in spools of thousands of feet!

If you end up wanting to try magnet wire if for no other reason than to learn about the stuff for a future finescale modeling project I will spring for a postage stamp and send you some.

You can often procure magnet wire by unwinding lengths from the armature of a scrapped motor or solenoid.

If you are soldering your connections,  you can just ignore the insulation and solder as if it were bare wire. The enamel will simply vaporize as you solder.

I use short lengths of it to make unobtrusive connections to track switches. Even in this high-current application it works fine as long as you switch to larger wire as soon as possible.

Yes, magnet wire can be a pain to work with.  A few folks have suggested plastic tubing which is a good idea; there is always some sort of plumbing under a house, so it wouldn’t look out of place.  If you want to make more work for yourself, you could add a telephone pole, or two, and bring the wire off the building then down to the ground.

ScottV posted:

I just finished construction of an elevated trackside structure an want to light it with some LEDs.  The challenge is that the structure is elevated on posts, so I need to hide the wires to power the lights.  I was thinking maybe something that resembles a drain pipe that could act as a channel going up one of the support posts, but have never seen anything that small.  I have really fine 28ga Kynar wire from Evans Designs.

Any suggestions?

 

Great building and I like your drain pipe idea.

Old "Ma Bell" wire would fit in a thin straw for that purpose. I think I have some if you want me to send it to you