11.15
My son got some Geo-Trax stuff for his birthday. I had never seen much of it before and I was really impressed with the quality of the toys. He has no problem snapping the tracks together and understanding how to work it all. The trains themselves are remote controlled and run on 3-AAA batteries each. Of course I can’t resist a little modding, and I saw that one of his trains looked like a prime candidate for a headlight. I took it apart(after he was in bed of course) and found a couple of good solder points that only went active when the train was moving. For the headlight I used a mini-Maglight flashlight bulb. It’s a perfect fit and it has leads like an LED. The train puts out about +3 over the two solder points so that makes the maglight bulb work brilliantly. My son was thrilled with the finished product. We played trains in the dark all night.
Here is a shot of the headlight in action. Very cool. Every train needs a headlight to navigate through dangerous boy rooms.
Here is the victim. It’s a cool looking little train and the front has a perfect little pocket hole that I drilled through to place the bulb in.
Here is an up-close shot of the hole where the maglight bulb sits. Just dis-assemble the train and drill from the front until your bit pushes through into the first cavity of the shell.
I didn’t want to glue the maglight bulb in place, in case I ever need to change it. Instead I just folded up a little piece of cardboard and placed it in the cavity behind the bulb to hold it in place.
After you solder your two wires to the maglight bulb leads, solder the other end of the wires to these two solder points. You will have to scrape the glue off of them first. I’ve marked them with red arrows.
Here is an up-close shot of the solder points you need.
After you solder everything up just reassemble the train, making sure to route your wires over the top of the train mechanism. The bulb is very bright and it only shines when the train is moving so it won’t suck the battery down too quickly. We played with it for probably 2 hours non-stop and it never slowed down.
