Because some of the work was so tedious, I would jump from carving to lighting to electrical and back. Today I felt like lighting and I was curious to see how the fiber lighting would look.

I purchased approx. 4,000 feet of .25 mm fiber optic cabling for lighting the cities and used about 3,000 feet of it. Manually drilling with a pin vise was just too slow. I found a pin vise that would fit into a Dremel-sized chuck, so using the Foredom FlexShaft and a #70 drill bit in the pin vise on at about 10 rpms works well. Any faster and the plastic melts or the bit breaks. Surgical tweezers are a must for threading the optics into their homes. Another worthy tool is a magnifying lamp.

This is the largest city being assembled and lit.

The first 15 fibers showed that the lighting would work well for scale. This city will end up with 400 lights by completion.