LED Dreadnought!

Continuing to work on my Lamenters army, it has become apparent that I need to pick up the game. So I contacted the guys I met from Powered Play Gaming while I was at Nova and picked up some of their LED kits!

What they offer are a set of pre wired LEDs complete with switch, battery, plug and play board and an assortment of colored lights.  Why is this awesome?  Because any one can do it.  I had zero experience with wiring or LEDs other than playing around with my tealight base.  I was intimidated by having to wire, solder, and power LEDs within my models.

These kids are intended to be used within wargaming models, and are made to be incredibly easy to use.  Here are some pictures showing how:

 Open up the pack and you pull out a mass of wires and a little board.  At first glance it seems a bit confusing, but each wire is labeled with it's color and it very quickly becomes apparent what to do. Any one who has hooked up an Xbox to a TV can do this!

Here is the board.  There are 6 sockets on the board. Two of them are larger than the others, These are the two that the switch and power goes into. It is obvious by the size of the plugs.

They sell miniature 9 volt batteries.  You can get one of these, or use the plug provided to hook up a regular sized 9 volt.

Here you can see the switch and battery about to go into their plugs.

Then you plug in one of the LED plugs into any of the four remaining slots and whammo!

Here is a closeup of the board. The two slots on the left are for the battery and switch, leaving 4 slots for LEDs. Easy?

If you decide not to get the miniature 9 volt which runs like 10 bucks, the kit comes with this regular 9 volt plug that you can use instead.

And here is the result!

My WIP dreadnought. I lit up the blood claws with red LEDs and the cockpit and range finders under the chassis with blue.

Here is the view without the armor on. I am painting up the pilot that will be exposed. You can see my clumsy application of the LEDs inside the cabin.  I used a hot glue gun to set them in place.  It was important to place them the way I did, pointing at the view finders, because I used a fiber optic pack also available from Powered Play.  I drilled out the range finders, and inserted a piece of fiber optic. The pack that they sell comes with three different sized round bits of optic plus a couple of square rods and a file.

The lights have to be shining into the ends of the optics in able to have the optic 'carry' the light.  Here you can see me showing how it works. If you look at the near end of the bit of optic you can see the blue light shining through.  The other end is up against the LED in the cabin.

Here you can see the back of my model and how I hid the wires. I built up a base using some plastic side walk pieces I found from a model train company.  It looks like temple flooring.  Inside the base I had enough room to store all of the wire and the battery and I used hot glue to seal it up. Yes, once the battery wears out, this guy will go dark. :(  Well not exactly, I purposefully glued the board to the base behind the model.

First this will allow me to put in a new battery if I desired. But also, this leaves me two extra slots to add more LEDs that I plan on using on my display. This dread is going to be in a repair gantry being worked on by servitors.  When he is on display I can plug him into some LEDs wired into the gantry!

Now, I suggest you use these before gluing your model together. This model was already painted red and has been re purposed as a Lamenters dread.  This meant I had to pull him apart to do the work.  The chassis came apart easy, but I had to drill holes into the arms to enable the LED to fit. I was able to wire the arms through the shoulders, but in order to wire the model to the base I had to drill holes through the bottom of the torso.  You can see the wires here.  Had I the know how to snip the wires, I could have maybe drilled holes through the legs before assembling the model, and wired them completely internally. But I found a good enough way. I inserted two straws into the base to serve as access pipes and left the wireing partly exposed on the ground .This will look like a ragtag repair bay where the dread is charging up...  I hope.  I will find some more wire bits and leave them lying around and stuff.  

I am going to use these to light up a landing pad for my Storm Raven, and to wire up the storm raven itself.  But again, it has been assembled, so I am fairly limited on what I can do.  For example I wanted to light up my Rhino headlights but since that model is almost complete it simply wont be possible.

Plan out whatever lighting you want to do while your models are still on sprue!

Any way, if I could do this, YOU can.  They are working with Secret Weapon to create some bases already built to house the wires and batteries, and have new stuff on the way, like a board that can make the LED "flicker".

I will have a lot more of this posted up soon including some how to Video once I shoot it.  Until then, this LED kit get a huge thumbs up from me. Visit the website HERE and if you want to take the leap give Chris a call, he was super helpful with suggesting how to do this.

More to come!

Jawaballs