Re: HOT TOYS : MMS DX 12 - The Dark Knight Rises - BATMAN / BRUCE WAYNE Full Specs &
There's only ONE catch to DIY. You should have basic soldering skills and of course a soldering iron, some solder and wires. 22 awg wire more than fine for the LED strips.
The easy way is just to use one or more segments of ribbon per shelf and make every shelf the same. Run THIN wires between the shelves connecting all your segments and finally out to a power supply. A 30w power supply will easily do 3 to 4 Detolfs if you don't use much more than 1 foot of LED per shelf.
The more involved way, which can look much better, is to plan each shelf's lighting depending on its content. If you like to have different numbers of figures per shelf and/or you pose them differently and possibly include custom backgrounds and other scene-related items, it's nice to place and aim the lighting in a scene-appropriate way to highlight but not blow out your characters. Shadow details really help to sell the lifelike aspect of a good figure. The wiring can be done in a simple chain-up way like with the easy method, but you'll want to cut smaller LED segments and think about angles and how you might hide the light sources so that you see its effects but not the LEDs themselves.
The way I like to handle Detolf lighting is to reduce wiring by adding electricity to the two metal rails themselves - one rail negative and the other positive. Then all you need is smaller wires per shelf to connect the lights to the rails - either pinched between shelf and rail or held with a small hair clip if you're not attaching a particular segment to a shelf. The other benefit of this method is you can also introduce individual LEDs to act as spot lights. You can pick up 50 (or more or less) pre-wired on eBay for a few bucks. These come with an appropriate resistor in-line with 6 or more inches of wire per LED. Available in many colors too.
You'll need to scrape/sand some of the paint off the point on the metal rail where you'll pinch the wires. Take a look at my office thread for details about this. Very easy to do is stick some LED ribbon on a shelf and provide a small wire tab on each side of the shelf to touch the rail. Here's something I never see anyone else mention - these LED ribbons can be lit from either end, including splitting positive and negative onto different ends - that means you can wire a shelf with as little as 1/4" of wire per end. This way you can also remove the shelf and replace it without ever having to unwire or disconnect anything. This can be done with custom shelves or the glass that comes with the Detolf. Again, see my thread for my own custom self-liting shelves.
