Exterior Wall Lights

I wanted to have working light for the exterior walls of my structure.  Z scale presents some unique challenges because of how small things have to be.  I looked and looked for some solution even if store bought.  Finally I hit on the idea of inserting a "rice" lamp into some square tube styrene.  I still had the problem making a lens that would be as realistic as I could come up with.  I remembered a mess I made on another project where I got too much "white" glue on something and I wound up with a semi-transparent clear glob.  I decided to see if I could an ugly glob into a lens that would look reasonable and diffuse the light from the rice lamp.  It worked out pretty good and after I put a resistor in the line I got more of a glow which is just the look I wanted.

In the first photo is a set of three fixtures in the making.  The first step was to cut 0.5" lengths of 0.010" square styrene tubing.  I used Plastruct instead of Evergreen because the inside dimensions were fit the rice lamp better.  I then put to coats of Grimy Black Polly Scale on the styrene pieces.  On one end I painted into the tube to darken the inside of the tube that might show and to prevent light from glowing through the tubing.  Next I slid the lamp into the tube so that lamp was not quite flush with the painted end of the tube.  I put a drop of CA glue on each end to secure the lamp.  Note how the wire leads are coiled to make a temporary stand to hold the light fixture upright.

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After the holding glue had set up I used a Superfine Mircobrush to apply very small drops of white glue into the tube over the lamp.  I let this dry and applied another drop, repeating this process until a small dome formed.  After the dried completely, I had a very nice looking light fixture that would serve for an exterior wall light.

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I cut 0.010' square hole in the exterior wall and the put the fixture in with just a slight protrusion on the external surface.  I CA glued the fixture to the wall.  I have sense gone back and added a gusset beneath the fixture for reinforcement.

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The photo below shows how it will look when the structure is complete.

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Materials:

Plastruct #90621 square styrene tubing

Miniatronics Corp Incandescent Lamps - Clear 1.5 volt, 30ma, 1.2mm dia