En taro Adun! I keep seeing people posting their Pylon builds with LED rigging, as well as sub-assembly painting, and wanted to take a crack at it. I feel like I got some decent results, and seeing as there isn’t a detailed guide yet, I thought I’d post my process, as well as things I’d do differently so you guys can learn from my mistakes. 

What you’ll need

Evan Designs Mini LED flicker kit: https://evandesigns.com/products/flickering-light-kit?variant=40840877310000 
I used three cool white LEDs, 8 inch wire, pico sized
¼ inch cork
Rotary tool

Sub assemblies

So it’s no secret that this kit is a little bit of a pain to paint in sub assemblies. It’s just the nature of a structure that has a floating clear crystal right in the middle of a couple of floating rings. I found that we can put it together for painting in 3 pieces. The crystal, the inner ring, and the outer ring. The outer ring can actually be fully assembled, with the two decorative things (parts 6 and 7) being glued to one half of the ring, then the other half of the ring can actually “snap” into place for painting, then removed with a little finagling for final assembly. There is a little bit of clear plastic from the crystal that interferes a little with parts 6 and 7, and maybe it’s a skill issue on my part but I couldn’t get them to work together when I did my final assembly, so I cut off the bulbous parts of my crystal that go there in the outer ring (pictured). They weren’t necessary for structural integrity, and they’re on the bottom of the model, unable to be easily seen. The inner ring I put together with a TINY drop of plastic cement and pulled apart after painting. I like to airbrush my values, so having the two rings complete while painting is a must, while keeping them separate from the crystal so our lovely LEDs can shine through. 

Rigging the LEDs

Here’s the bulk of the work! First I traced out where the battery pack and the power switch will go on the base with a silver sharpie, then I broke out my rotary tool and got to cutting these out. After that, I got some ¼ inch cork and superglued a layer of it on top of the base, and then went back to my rotary tool and excavated two pockets for the battery pack and switch so that the base will still be flush with the ground with all the electrical components inside. The little hole in the bottom of the base is typically reserved for a magnet, but here it makes a great guide for drilling a hole right through the middle of the base, so I went ahead and did that as well. This is a good time to line up the crystal on your base and drill a hole in the bottom of it as well. After cleaning off the plastic and cork dust off my desk, I primed some 1mm brass rod in black, and carefully superglued my LEDs on, making sure the light was facing away and that they were facing different directions for good light coverage. This was a good time to do a wiring test, so I followed the instructions on the kit by taking all the exposed red wires from the LEDs, bunching them up and twisting them with the exposed red wire coming out of the power switch, then covering it with shrink tube (electrical tape will work here as well), then doing the same for the black wires. After confirming everything was in working order, I glued down the power switch, then secured the battery back with some poster putty, so I can pull it out for servicing when I need a fresh battery. Then came the tricky part, lining up the fully constructed pylon, and inserting the brass rod with LEDs and gluing everything into place. I took my time and eventually I got everything to be decently lined up, with the LED rod sticking straight up. Then it was just a matter of doing some cable management at the bottom of the base by gluing down everything that had rubber shrink tube, and the project was basically done!

Painting tips

There’s a million ways you can paint this thing and none of them are wrong. This hobby has no rules and that’s why I love it, but for me, what I did was airbrush the crystal with a satin varnish, then did a light drybrush of Vallejo ice yellow to bring out the details while still keeping the entire thing translucent. Then I did a light airbrush of thinned down Citadel Aethermatic blue contrast paint to tint the crystal into a nice turquoise color, then I airbrushed some Payne’s gray ink on places where I wanted to hide my sins a little, like the bottom of the crystal where I drilled the whole, and the awkward parts of electrical zaps that connect the crystal to the outer ring (I made sure to mask these off with poster putty while I airbrushed the outer ring!). 

Things I would do differently

I made the LEDs all about an inch apart from each other in hopes of getting more light coverage throughout the crystal, but all it really did was make it look like there are three LEDs in there. If I could go back I would make the LEDs way closer together. I think it would look way cooler if there was a single source of energy in the middle.
Each LED has its own piece of square shrink tube that is just SLIGHTLY thicker than the base, so it comes off the ground just a hair when I put the model down. It’s not that big a deal, but I do wish I would have excavated a hole just for these so the base sits perfectly flush with the table.

That about does it! Good luck everyone!