 Hello there, Bruce here in the workshop today. Gonna talk about wiring up standard LEDs. How to get the wires connected to them and the resistors and all that. The way that I found works best for me. Got a collection of tools and supplies. The wire strippers. Gonna kind of set them off the side as I talk about them. Cutters. Couple of versions of tweezers. This is a tweezers that's designed to clamp items. Very helpful in doing this work. Couple of sizes of shrink tubing. Three 64ths and one 16th inch diameter. I'll talk about the difference there later. Some solder. Some wire. If you're gonna wire it up, it kinda helps to have wire. The LED and the resistor itself. Some scissors that we'll use to cut the shrink tubing. And of course my handy dandy buzzer that I talked about in some of my columns. I don't like to work on anything that isn't gonna produce for me. So first I'm gonna test the LED. You'll see the longer lead is the positive lead. So I'm gonna hook the positive lead from my buzzer to it. And I'll hook the negative lead to the other. And there we go. This is a standard resistor. Regular bodied resistor. Nothing particularly special. In fact these are ones that I got for a really good price. A few cents apiece that I used for some lighting projects. And buildings and that sort of thing. Fluorescent lights and buildings and that sort of thing. It's a pretty bright white LED. But it's a good thing to practice on too because they're fairly inexpensive. You'll notice that there's a longer lead on the LED and a shorter lead. The longer lead is going to be the positive lead. And I like to put the resistor in the positive lead. It's just kind of a quirk of mine. It doesn't really matter. There's nothing magical about it. So what I'm gonna do, if you get it positioned just right here, you can see that there's kind of some die marks on the LED. We'll just inboard that first die mark on the longer lead. I'm gonna cut that lead. And there it is. So now I have the lead prepared and ready for the wire to go onto it. I'm just gonna clamp it in those pliers that I talked about. And I'm a scuba diver. I need something to hold these pliers down. I'm a scuba diver so I have lots of lead shot bags running around. And that's what this is. It's a couple pounds of lead shot in a bag. And that makes it real easy to hold those little tweezers down. So I've cut the resistor off fairly short. And we're ready to go to work soldering. Off screen here you can hear me cleaning the tip on the soldering iron in the wet sponge. And we're gonna bring in our little solder jig here and the soldering iron. Wet the tip of the soldering iron so it's nice and wet with solder. And then I'm gonna come in here and tin the end of the LED. And tin the end of the resistor. Now I'm pretty seriously right-handed. So now I'm gonna put the resistor in my right hand. Put the soldering iron in my left hand. Bring the two together. And that's soldered. That's done. You can see by the tug on it. It's not going anywhere. Now I'm gonna come in and cut both leads off relatively short. That's ready to go. Now we're gonna put a blue wire onto the resistor, which is the positive lead. The reason for that being that the positive goes to that location in the blue wire in a DCC decoder. There's the handy dandy little strippers. Then I'll just pinch this and spin it. Spin the wire. And that puts a little twist into it. Put that there so that we can tin it. Back in with some solder. Again a quick tin. Zoomed in close here you get a little better look at the actual work. Okay, first I need to tin the resistor and the LED lead. Now notice I'm not using any flux. I don't see any need for flux in these sorts of operations. Okay, so we come in with the, there we go, a little tug on it. Now I've got a good solid connection. We'll take a piece of white wire, strip it, twist it. Get the solder back in here so that we can tin it. And then I'm gonna switch hands again. Get the white wire right onto that lead of the LED. Hold it in place, make sure that it's solid. Okay, now all we need to do is to insulate these connections. I'm gonna use heat shrink tubing. I'm gonna use the thinner, the 360 fourths on the lead only. And I'm gonna use the 116th inch diameter on the resistor lead. The reason being that the 116th will slide right over the whole connection resistor and everything. And, oops, pulled it out of the clip there. Pick it up here and just slide it down. Turn this around so that you can see it. There's the heat shrink on the resistor. Slide this up the other lead, right over that little bit of solder sticking out there. And we come in with the embossing tool. I talked about in the column that I got from the local hobby store, local craft store. And we're gonna hit this with some heat. I'm gonna come around it here and hit it from this side so that I'm not blowing heat into my bag. Won't do a lot of damage to it, but you need to be careful with this tool because you might have a shell or something in the background. And if you hit that with the heat, you can wrinkle some handrails very, very quickly. So here we go. A little bit of heat. Watch this sucker shrink right down. Blew the solder out of the way. Let's see, there you got a nice, tight, clean connection. That's the way I like to do them. I like to do them this way first. Even if I'm going to be wiring them to a decoder, then I can get the light in place and I can do a little splice joint with the decoder.