Hi, I was just reading that in german march Trainini there is some description to make advertising pillars. This give me some reason to dig out an old project, where I was building quite a lot of this, giving most away to friends. It's illuminated, and if you simulate a flickering half-dead neon tube, it gives you some thrilling touch to your layout. To the construction : All parts where molded in some 2ml injection syringe. This is named "Plastic Injection Molding" They have at the top an inner diameter of 8,5mm, and you just need to suck, best 2 times for the bubbles, some 2 component gray glue inside and ajust the height to more or less 1mm. Very important is the shape of the syringe, it must have pointed top and pointed piston! The roof and the bottom are made from the same part. I used gray metallic glue from double syringe, UHU and some other companies make this. The light body must be made from clear glue, it need about 6mm diameter to be in scale. I cut for this about 12mm lenght in an 8mm dowel. Now we cut the top from roof and bottom and make some 3mm hole inside. In the clear part also, about 4mm deep. For the moment we stay the top from this, we cut after glueing everything together. Next is grinding the gray parts with 1000paper, giving perfect concret look. We glue first a 3mm led in the bottom, after the body and the roof. Now we need just do reduce the clear top part to 0,5mm and cover with a spot of (copper) painting for the roof ventilation. Last operation is to print the paper out and just wrap around with clear tape, finished.
Cool stuff Armand, Its too bad we dont have advertising pillars in the U.S. For a European layout, its a great eye catcher.
Those are really neat! I have seen some in San Francisco, and New York, but mostly they are not common here. The like to use billboards instead. Nice project!
Armand, What a great project! I have a question on the last picture: what's the tile flooring that's under the scenery? Eric
Hi Robert, Yes Jim was talking me about, you are right, i forgot about this. Just this is also an easy way to make round concret base and round roofs for other project. Some syringes are big enough to make base for round house or carousel and so on. Perhaps even covers for tank transporters, fuel tanks and so on. Hi Eric, It is made from some solid paper and if I remember it is for HO. This mut be Faller or something like this. If you want I can look, but it is on other place, so I could tell you in a few days only.
Armand, you are giving inspiration to do some flat lighted signs. I wil make one as soon as I get my hands on some smds.
John, I was thinking the same, I was trying to see where Armand's idea could be used on a older US layout with some modifications, I could not think of one, but has got me inspired to do some lighting. For lighted signs you could try to use cellphone screens. They have done all the engineering to get the LED's, reflectors and diffusers to have the screen light up bright and uniform. If you open the cell phone keep all the thin plastic sheets that goes behind the screen those are the ones that make the light appear uniform, the whole thing is pretty thin and will make a good billboard. The best option would be use the whole screen to display an image so you can have a different billboard depending on your moods. Kim
Armond, how do you keep the gray and clear epoxy from sticking inside of the syringe? Assume you push it back out after curing from small hole end. .
Hi Jeff, In genereral you have just to pull on the piston. The bodies from the syringes are made from PP if I remember, anyway some plastic not sticking at all to the glue. For the synthetic rubber of the piston, the same but perhaps little more, because easy to take out this way. There is always an opportunity if not to push with some stick but in general its going out easy.
