@texgeekboy posted:Thanks, I'll be using your method. I have an LED strip attached to the top beam of the car, so connecting the wires for the tail lights to it should be simple. I'll be using rounded 3mm warm white LEDs for this. I'll drill into the modified plastic lenses as far as I'm comfortable doing, and then CA glue the LEDs in.
3mm LEDs are generally what I use for Diesel engine headlights and Mars lights on steamers. They are generally very bright and you need to be careful that light does not escape around the base or you will find your car/engine interior brightened up by them. I’ve had to seal bulbs of this size in to prevent that.
In the end I used flat surface mount LEDs in my observation car project, although they had to be installed at a slight angle inside the lens to cast light through the whole of it, which was not an easy task. There are 1.8mm LEDs you can use but the base of these is larger than the bulb. I think that I also used red LEDs from Evan Designs in this project, and they are independently powered from the overhead lighting.
Someone more expert than me can advise on this but I would have thought you’d have no voltage issue with warm white LEDs tapping into a strip of the same kind of bulbs. However, in my last project adding two very small (Z size) LEDs to a stock recent model (2020) Lionel LED overhead lighting strip to illuminate markers at the rear of the car, they dimmed down the strip in a way I did not expect. I swear by GRJ’s passenger car lighting modules, which are better than Lionel’s super-capacitor strips.
