Hmm that resistor value cant be right.With a 4 band resistor the last band to the left or right should either be gold or silver.Can you post where you got the light strand from?

Warm white LEDs usually have a forward voltage of 3.2 to 3.8 V. The 3 LR44 are providing 4.5 volts. The max current for each LED is 30mA there using Ohms law you should have a 10-30 ohm resistor in the circuit. The color bars for a 10 ohm 4 band resistor are brown black black gold.

Carl

I brought the lights of eBay so no data info sorry.

What lights would you look at using I’m trying to keep the bulbs as small as possible around 3mm with a warm glow don’t want it being bright.

I have a motor that fits in the generator and I 3d pritned a little spacer that holds it nice and tight in the kit parts. You may need to put a bearing on the shaft for the large flywheel so it turns easily, but if you do that you should be able to use the generator motor to drive the flywheel.The motor I found has a decent amount of torque and it turns quite slowly. I will post some pictures over the weekend.

As far as the lights go I think the ones you found will work fine with a resistor and 12v DC . I think the kit supplied ones are overscale.

Carl

OK that a 4ohm resistor. It looks like the LEds are wired in parallel. Normally for one warm white LED you would need about 40ohm resistor per LED. I think what thye have done is just use one resistor for the whole chain of LEDs to save money and make assembly easier.its a bad idea because each LED really needs its own resistor.You can "get away" with using just one resistor sometimes but it causes problems because unless the LEDs are identical you will get different forward voaltges and this will lead to some LEDs getting a lot of current and soem getting less current.In the best case scenario this will mean that some LEDs are dimmer than others.In the worst case scenarios you may get a few LEDs getting far more than their maximum current and these LEDs will burn out very quickly.

I would suggest hooking up your string of LEDs to the battery pack they supplied and leave them on for a few hours.I would bet you will have some fail or have some burn out or will see they are very uneven in tbeir amount of illumination.

A better solution would be an LED strip.I will post an example over the weekend of what I mean.

All looking good, you obviously know more than me about electronics, sounds like you're an expert, what's this +and - you're talking about.

Thanks guys for dropping by.

Sorry to here the jab knocked you for six Carl, theres no rush for the bits you doing as and when.

Anyway some more little mods.

Grills added to the generator


Replacing the plastic floor with a wooden one.

Great work mate.

OK guys here are some video clips shwoing the electronics set up for the traction engine. This circuit was made on a protoboard.The actual circuit board will be very small and will fit inisde the main body of the traction engine with wires connecting to all of the other parts.

video1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqwx-z0oonQ

video2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGLSvNrPXfI

video3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3tns4IbveQ

video4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6EoZxDgpo8

video5
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIAdaV-4cY0

The videos are very short, but they do go over how to use an RF remote to control LEds etc.. inside a model.

Carl

So we are discussing what light to use for the roof. One possibility would be to use LEDs and fiber optics. So here is a mock up of using a warm white LED and a 0.75mm fiber optic installed into one of the kit bulbs by drilling out a 1 mm hole into to bulb.