With this old forum thread I was able to rebuild the lights in my Star Trek 25th and I am very pleased with the results so I thought I would “refresh” the topic. When I acquired the ST25 about a month ago, the lights and driver board were missing but fortunately all the wiring was still there. I bought the replacement board from Marco’s and set out to building my own light strips. I purchased 12v 5mm LED’s from Amazon as well as 8mm ID blue air hose tubing. I used this forum thread exclusively for guidance.
This project is not for the impatient person as it took me about 4 to 5 hrs. to do. I’m sure I could do it twice as fast if I did it again because I made some mistakes I would not repeat. First of all the wires in the LED’s are extremely thin and fragile so striping them was a real PITA. Buy extras! Secondly, I thought I could simply push the finished light strips into the blue tubing because they seemed to fit nicely. Don’t do this! They are very fragile and pushing, pulling and general handling of them will break the wires. After several reattempts to get the lights inside the tube which resulted in a lot of re-soldering and replacing broken LED’s, I finally just slit open the blue tubing and “placed” the lights strips inside. This is definitely the way to go so if you are planning to do this project save yourself a lot of time and headache by doing it this way from the start.
Each completed light strip is approx. 18” long and contain 18 LED’s at 1” spacing. All LED’s are soldered to a common lead and every 3rd LED is soldered to a separate ground wire. I covered the bare wire and solder with liquid electrical tape.