04-25-2011, 07:14 PM
This has been a learning experience for me. It is amazing the stupid things we do. :mrgreen: .
I was making those lights last night, and after gluing all the #8 washers on the LED's I painted the "shades" with a small paint brush and craft paint. It hit me this morning, I have about 6 cans of nice green spray pain, I could have sprayed them all first.
Here are some pictures to kind of show how I did it a little better
After I had the shade installed I used a piece of the insulation from the 18 Ga. wire to insulate the anode on the LED, then I bent each lead 90 degrees opposite each other.
Then I soldiered the approximate length of bared wire to each lead. In this case I did it until I had 5 lights on a string, then on one end I made a 90 degree bend to tuck in the corner and ran a lead with an added 1000 ohm 1/2 watt resistor soldiered in place. I did the same on the other end but no resistor is needed.
I used hot glue to hold the wire and lamps in place. I'll paint the wire and down tubes black. I'm not going to do more with them because they are not visible.
here is the link to the place I got the LED's <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.electron.com/search.php?mode=search&page=1&q=412my8c">http://www.electron.com/search.php?mode ... &q=412my8c</a><!-- m -->
I ordered a bunch of different LED's including some very nice warm white for headlights as well as some great looking small blue ones for blue flag protection at night. I also ordered a lot of switches to justify the shipping cost. (These folks were great although I think they are a very small company)
Here are a few more pictures
Charlie
I was making those lights last night, and after gluing all the #8 washers on the LED's I painted the "shades" with a small paint brush and craft paint. It hit me this morning, I have about 6 cans of nice green spray pain, I could have sprayed them all first.
Here are some pictures to kind of show how I did it a little better
After I had the shade installed I used a piece of the insulation from the 18 Ga. wire to insulate the anode on the LED, then I bent each lead 90 degrees opposite each other.
Then I soldiered the approximate length of bared wire to each lead. In this case I did it until I had 5 lights on a string, then on one end I made a 90 degree bend to tuck in the corner and ran a lead with an added 1000 ohm 1/2 watt resistor soldiered in place. I did the same on the other end but no resistor is needed.
I used hot glue to hold the wire and lamps in place. I'll paint the wire and down tubes black. I'm not going to do more with them because they are not visible.
here is the link to the place I got the LED's <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.electron.com/search.php?mode=search&page=1&q=412my8c">http://www.electron.com/search.php?mode ... &q=412my8c</a><!-- m -->
I ordered a bunch of different LED's including some very nice warm white for headlights as well as some great looking small blue ones for blue flag protection at night. I also ordered a lot of switches to justify the shipping cost. (These folks were great although I think they are a very small company)
Here are a few more pictures
Charlie