HO scale animated police cars


Dominick

Member
I keep seeing these cars on peoples HO scale layouts on youtube
but cant find them for purchase anyone happen to know where to get them?
 
You can get them on e-bay. There's one now at http://cgi.ebay.com/Busch-HO-custom...3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=66:2|65:1|39:1|240:1318 for $30 + $3.50 shipping. This guy is going out of business so I suggest you get one now if you're interested. There used to be several more people who made and sold these on e-bay as a cottage industry but the bad economy has driven them out of the market. :( The other choice are some police and fire vehicles from Busch that are lighted but they are expensive and the light bars are grossly oversized.

This is a picture of a lighted fire truck and police car on my layout. Unfortunately, the folks that made them have stopped doing so. They look pretty neat on your layout, especially at night.

EmergEquiponMainMedium.jpg
 
Last edited by a moderator:
You know you can buy the Nano LED's from Ngineering, and the circuitry to make the lighting.
 
Yeah, their LED's are so small you would not need fiber optics to get the light bar, as you can just use the LED!
 
Finally got to look at them today not to bad not sure about you
guys but price isn't to bad either thanks for the tip :)
 
they sure beat heck out of me trundling my wheelbarrow full of horse poop around, with its little battery operated train noise thingy under the handle! I have a whistle that I can blow, too, when I need to come around a corner.

:D :D
 
LTF, LOL, I'd love to see you blowing the whistle on a wheeel barrow full of poop. :)

Dominick, I bought one of the police cars off e-bay about two years ago with the ide of reverse engineering it and making my own. After disassembly and seeing the amount of mechanical and electrical work involved, I concluded that the ones on e-bay were a bargain. I think that's one of the reasons they are starting to become harder to find is they should cost more like $40 to return a reasonable profit and most people won't pay that today.
 
I agree UP2CSX $40 per is pricey And I'm sorry if I sound full of myself I don't mean to but I am able to put together the electronics all I need are some nice
police/fire/ambulance/school buses that have the ability to come apart
for modding
 
well the Boley Fire trucks come apart very easily. I have a couple hundred and plan to add lights to some of them.
 
...all I need are some nice
police/fire/ambulance/school buses that have the ability to come apart
for modding

Therein lies the greatest issue. The plastic models are usually glued together. You have to at least cut out part of the bottom of the car and then take off the lightbar to add the LED's without damaging the car or the lightbar too much. Once you get the light bar modified, but not destroyed, which is easy to do, you then have to snake the wires back though two holes in the roof and then make a plastic channel to cover the wires so you don't see then from the outside. If you're lucky, you can glue the lightbar back on to cover the wire holes but sometimes you have to use styrene putty and then repaint the roof. Once you get the wires out of the bottom of the car, then you have to solder the appropriate resistors in place and insulate them. Finally, use some small heat shrink tubing so you can keep everything together for the hole that has to go down through the layout to the power source.

Like I said, buy one off e-bay and see how it's done. I'm not very good with electronics although I am half ways decent at kitbashing. It may be well within your skills to reproduce the lighting but it looked pretty daunting to me.
 
The best thing to do is mount the board that controls everything into the truck if there is enough room. Then you can just run 2 wires to the power source. maybe even make it a plug so you can move trucks around. I have an idea but have to find a good circuit that is A small enough to fit into a HO scale police car and B have a prototypical flashing pattern as some of the trucks you see online just have random flashing LEDs and it does not look right.
 
UP2CSX agreed it does sound like a task in a half :) .

MGWSY I most likely will be just doing the LEDs in the car hiding the wires
then fishing them through the board then make 2 circuit boards that each will handle a hand full of cars at once but the 2 different boards are there so that I can have one clock pulse that then is halved to the second module this way some cars have a faster flash rate and the others have a slower.

2 central boards less IC components but now makes wiring a bit more
But I would rather the headache of wiring than the money spent on
multiple of the same circuit
 
I saw his booth at the last train show I went to. He had some neat stuff, and decent prices. I wish I had more money at the time!

Rotor
 



Back
Top