Interior lighting tuning

In one of my previous posts I have described my method of adding interior lighting to a G scale passenger car. And since I own more than one, I wanted to equip all of them with lighting kits. So I went ahead and created three more.

Nothing new here of course. Maybe except for the fact, that those kits definitely turn out better and better with each piece I make. Perhaps one day I should be selling them?

But let's get back to the topic. One thing I did not like that much in the kit I made for my first car was that the light was not bright enough. I've used there a 4.7kOhm resistor, exactly the same that I use in N scale. Seems it was just too much for a G scale model and I decided to do something about it.

I was not sure what the correct value for my LED-current-limiting resistor would be and I decided to experiment. I equipped each of the kits with a different resistor and compared the results. Here are the photos of my cars, taken at the very same camera settings using different resistor values:

These photos do not really look that different. The change is actually much more visible in real life. But still - if you compare 1kOhm version with the 4.7kOhm one, the difference is obvious.

With the 4.7kOhm resistor, the car is just slightly lit on the inside. And with the 1kOhm version not only the inside is well lit, but the LEDs illuminate the outside of the car a little, too.

And of course the difference is perfectly visible if you compare just the sections of the original photos.

Personally I like the brightest version best. It just looks nice. There are two reasons however why I did not go for it:

• While my personal opinion is that it looked nice, it did not look realistic any more. Realism is not my priority but... I hesitated to make my cars that bright.
• With a decrease in the resistor value comes the decrease of the positive effect that the flicker-free capacitor gives. And with only 1kOhm the light was fading out much, much quicker when the power was cut.

In the end I decided to use 2kOhm resistor for all my cars. It seemed like a good compromise. Here's the end result:

The point of the exercise? It pays off to make something yourself. You have then a full freedom of customizing it and you can get a result that you're really happy with!