Brain Surgery On an Ant
Remember a while back I'd remarked that not everything always goes perfectly? Here's a good example of something that went terribly wrong. I was in the midst of installing the old mill on the layout when the wire to the light on the pole snapped. While it was fortunate that it snapped at the driver circuit board and not the end of the pole—which would have been Terminal—it was nevertheless Really Bad.
You see, the wire for these lights isn't really wire; it's an extremely thin, narrow strip of flexible insulating material with a PC board-like copper trace on each side, all sealed inside a protective coating. The end that's connected to the driver circuit board has two patches of bare copper that are pressed against a pair of contact pads with a plastic spring clip. The material broke right at the clip, so the connection points were gone; there was no way to deliver power to the LED.
After muttering a string of unsavory remarks, I set about devising a means of repair. Replacing the light was out of the question; I was not prepared to entertain any notions of tearing the mill back out of the layout. Ultimately I determined that the only practical approach was to scrape off the protective coating from the traces on both sides and carefully solder on a pair of ultra-fine solenoid wires (above); these wires would then be soldered to the contact pads on the driver circuit board.
It took several tries—with breaks in between my attempts to calm down—but eventually I was successful. Given the incredibly delicate materials involved and the impossibly small margin of error, it felt as if I was performing brain surgery on an insect. Once I'd confirmed the light worked, I sealed the repair in a glob of acrylic paint to protect it, which made it look vaguely insect-like (below).
Just to make things that much more challenging, all of this had to be done in situ, as the structure was already permanently attached to the layout. I'd even covered the circuits in preparation for scenery—it's a good thing I hadn't yet mixed up the Sculptamold! It wasn't the most fun way to spend my modeling time today, but such are the ups and downs of the hobby. I still love it more than anything.