Creating Christmas scenes using Fiber Optics

Some years back I made an English Pub for my layout, which my wife named “The Wet Whistle”.  It’s been great as a scene on the river front but I realized that with Christmas coming up it was time to give it a bit of a lift.  How about some Christmas lights?  I loathe putting these on my house and taking them down in the dead of winter.  However, my basement is the ideal spot, so I decided, let’s do it.

One of the greatest challenges I faced was getting the fiber to follow the roof line.  Well, you may have read about the new trick I discovered of straightening fibers.  What if I instead used that technique to put permanent bends in the fiber instead?  So that’s what I did.  I then painted the fiber to match the building, and using a utility knife I cut the fiber along it’s length while having the fiber inserted into a Lamplighter box so I could immediately see the effect of each cut.  A green Sharpie marker came in very handy for painting every second nick, followed by using a red one for each of the intervening nicks.  It was now time to see how it looked on the pub.

I liked the effect, but decided some lighting along the straight roof line would look great.  So, once more I used boiling water to both straighten the fiber and then add a sharp bend at the end and used a piece of aluminum tube to hide the fiber in what now looks like a down spout.