Finally have some pictures....

[Josephbw]

Here I have most of the plywood down. I am modeling northern Illinois, which is pretty flat, but I will model small hills and valleys with foam as I scenic the layout.

[Josephbw]

While I was laying the plywood, I also installed bracing for the center two-faced backdrop.

[Josephbw]

Here I have the Homasote down, a temporary circle of track for breaking in engines, and cork laid for the permanent mainline on the left. Most of that area will be a large yard. I also have the brackets installed for the LED layout lighting that a friend made for me.

[William Brillinger]

Joseph, Have you considered blogging about your construction on MRH?

[Josephbw]

In this shot I have the LED strip lighting installed, but not the LED room lighting yet. An interesting phenomenon I discovered (which makes perfect sense once you think about it), looking at the left wall, you can see the lighting starts out bright at the beginning of the strip on the far left, then fades a little at the end of the 16' strip. Then the next strip starts off bright and fades and so on. The power adapter for each 16' strip powers from one end, and each LED has a resistor, so each LED gets a little dimmer as the current is reduced with each consecutive resistor.

[Josephbw]

Joseph, Have you considered blogging about your construction on MRH?

Hi Bill, I've never done a blog, so I hadn't given any thought to starting one. That's something I'll have to think about. My computer time is limited as I spend most of my free time in the basement working on various phases of my layout. I may do one, but it won't be in the near future.

Joe

[William Brillinger]

Joe,

About your LED's: if you run a power bus for the LED's and supply power at both ends of each strip, or better yet, at the 1/4 and 3/4 points, the dimming along the length problem will be fixed.

Having a Blog on MRH is as simple as doing what you are doing here now - except it will be read and appreciated by a wider audience.

- Bill

[Josephbw]

Hi Bill,

These lights are powered by a 12V DC transformer that plugs into one end with a male/female connector. Each 16' strip has one transformer. I originally thought I could power 3 strips with one transformer, but that idea was a miserable failure. I can live with the lighting, it's not as noticeable in person.

I may eventually make a blog, but like I said that's a future project. I had a friend of mine come up today and help me build a paint booth. I need to go down there now and finish up a few things on it so we can hang it tomorrow.

Take care,
Joe

[Alan]

I have noticed the end to end brightness difference of LED strips varies greatly between suppliers. When I was first experimenting with LED strip lighting I had 3 strips each from a different China supplier. 2 of the strips exhibited the dimming like yours. The 3rd strip had no detectable difference. Naturally I bought all the needed strips from the 3rd supplier.

My strips are powered at just one end like yours and I cannot see any dimming effect along their length. Just to cover my bases I mounted the strips connection-to-connection. That way if there is a brightness difference that I can't see but someone else might then it would be masked by not having a bright end butted against a dim end. Here is what I mean by that:



My strips are all powered by a single 40A supply with 12ga bus to the strips. The connection to the bus is shown in the photo.

Bills comment about feeding power from both ends is a good suggestion. The dimming is caused by the resistance of the foil trace on the strip, not because of the resistors.

[TwinStar]

It appears a little late for you but I'll reply for the sake of others. Clouds are the things that I see guys get wrong most often. Cloud bases form where the temperature and dew point converge. As such, the cloud bases that you paint on your wall need to be at the same height accounting only for perspective. The bases will be flat and then cumulus clouds will be puffy with defined edges.

[Josephbw]

Hi Jacob,

The larger higher clouds are closer, the other clouds are farther away at varying distances, but at basically the same height, with the smaller clouds being the farthest from the viewer. At least that was my plan.

Joe

[TwinStar]

Perspective is tough. Fortunately we don't have backdrops in Free-mo!