See the Light

I've always planned to add some street lights to 'Shifting Sands' but finding the right design and look has taken some time. Ideally I'd like some concrete tapered columns but couldn't see an easy way to produce these (although 3D printing may of some possibilities if anyone wants to try...). Last year I spotted a light in Ulrome, on the East Riding coast, that offered some possibilities:

Now I suspect this is on private land rather than part of the council set-up, but it ticked the boxes for the '
look' I was after. What follows is not an exact copy but an 'inspired by' lamp.

Here are the raw materials, K&S 1/16" brass tubing, some larger (I believe 3/32") brass tube that telescopes over, Evergreen 1/8" styrene tubing, brass drawing pins and a Modelscene 4mm scale lamp.

The first step is to upscale the lamps from the 4mm product. Each shade was drilled in the centre to accept the drawing pin and the lamp holder was carefully cut from the post, cleaned up and drilled to accept the 1/16" tubing.

The 1/16" tubing runs through the whole height of the lamps. I cut the length of tubing in half to 6" lengths, giving a good length of tube to go through the baseboard and a lamp height of approx 125mm. I cut a 50mm length of the 3/32" tubing and soldered this in place 45mm from the top of the pole.

The final step was to add a 28mm length of the 1/8" styrene tube to form the base of the lamp post, this was drilled out with a 2.5mm drill bit at the top to overlap the brass tube and given a slight angle around the top. Both the bases and lamps were fixed in place with Araldite, although the lamp shades and drawing pins are still separate parts at this stage to aid painting.  On each base I added a 12 x 4mm inspection cover from 5 thou styrene sheet.

The lamp post are now ready to paint and plant on the layout, but that is for another day!

Colin