Installing lights in fuselage

Hello back again in my blog. This time I will show you where and how I installed the LED‘s in the fuselage.

Since my friend Sven and I are making a group-build we agreed to place the LED‘s at the same places in the aircraft. He is very experienced with the integration of Richards sets into models and therefore exactly knew where to place the lamps and hide the cabling. He send me a lot of fotos as reference which made the job much easier for me. Thanks again a lot, Sven!

Here is a list of the places where the LEDs were placed:

• Bomb-Aimers-Compartment

• Beside the instrument-panel

• Above the navigators place

• Beside the general-service-panel

• Above the wireless-operators place

• Above the crew-entrance-door

• 2 navigation-lights at the rear beneath the rear turret

Since the LEDs are very bright we also decided to paint them all in clear red which reduces their brightness and corresponds to the real lights in the original plane.

Here are some pictures of the installed lamps:

1. Bomb-Aimers-Compartment:

First the Lamp and the cables were installed with Bondic-Glue and afterwards everything was painted.

2. Beside the instrument-panel:

As far as I found out, the instruments in the Lancaster weren’t lighted from their back but through lamps above or beside the panels.

3. Above the navigators and wireless-operators place:

Cable-guiding as necessary in order not to be squeezed by cockpit-parts. Painting was done afterwards.

4. Beside the general-service-panel:

As you can see the cables are guided under the panel.

5. Above the crew-entrance-door:

It works ! 😀

6. 2 navigation-lights at the far rear:

Next thing was to glue the cables running from the main-board to the rear to the bottom of the fuselage.

As already stated in the last post these are the 4 cables to the 2 navigation-lights, the 2 cables to the light above the entrance-door and the 2 bigger power-cables.

This is how the installation looks like:

Again I had to take care that all bulkheads installed with the cockpit won’t squeeze the cables.

The power-cables were located near to the tailwheel fixation because they will be guided through the big tailwheel into the baseplate.

Then followed an illumination test.

Here are some photos with the lights working:

Bomb-Aimers-Compartment:

Cockpit and navigators-place:

Wireless-operator:

Fuselage-door from outside:

Tail-navigation-lights:

That‘s all for today. I hope you enjoyed it.

In the next post I will show you how I installed the cable-extensions for the wing-electronics to the fuselage and how I prepared the cockpit for guiding all the cables through the cockpit to the back of the bomb-bay where the main-board is placed.