If anyone is interested - here is a tutorial that I wrote for our flytying club
For months I have been looking for a decent LED fly tying lamp. I saw a few at horrendous prices, between R800 and R1200. Way too expensive and not always appropriate to my needs. In addition, once the LED gives up the ghost on those things, it is not possible to repair because they are all custom made and sealed into units. So, after many nights of “designing a lamp” instead of “counting sheep”, I came up with the idea of making my own lamp that suited my needs and pocket.
When I set about to make the lamp, I wanted to make it, as cheap as possible, as bright as I needed, reasonably “handsome” – and also not to run all around town looking for components
So, I went down to the local Mica hardware shop and spent about an hour looking through the electrical department and bought the following:
- 2 meters of white PVC conduit
- 1 PVC 90 degree sharp elbow
- 1 PVC coupling
- 1 electrical dome lid
- 1 socket box (the kind you put into the wall)
- 1 blank cover for the socket box
- PVC glue
- A press button table lamp switch
- 2 meters of electrical cord
- A 12 volt transformer (which I need not have bought – see later in the write up below)
- 2 of 300mm LED strip lights (18 LEDs each). I decided that one would not give sufficient light
- Bolts nuts and washers
- At home I had a strip of flat aluminium 40mm wide and 2mm thick (a left over from another project), some large lead sinkers that I will never use and a tube of silicon sealer
This is how I built it I started by cutting the conduit to size, one for the vertical piece and another for the horizontal piece that would hold the LEDs. The height of the lamp I measured by eye – and what was comfortable for me at my desk making sure that there was enough space when using a bobbin.
I took the cone shaped dome lid and glued the PVC sleeve onto its tapered end. The problem here was that there was not enough of the head on the cone to hold the sleeve securely. So I took some thin galvanised wire and made four pins that I heated up and burnt through the sleeve and through the end of the cone (see picture) and glued it together. The cone is a different kind of plastic to the PVC and the PVC glue does not work. However, with the pins through both, a sufficient join was made. I then glued the vertical conduit into the sleeve.(there may be a better way of doing this - but I was just wanting to finish the lamp)[smg id=2933]
I then drilled holes in the socket box cover and bolted the cone shaped fitting on it. I also drilled a hole for the push button switch as well as a two holes for the electrical cable to the transformer – one on the cover below the cone so that the wire could be fed up the vertical conduit, and another on the side of the socket box leading to the transformer. I then installed the switch on the cover.
I cut the aluminium strip to just over the length of the LED fittings, leaving enough space on either side so that it could be bolted onto the horizontal piece of PVC. I bolted the LED fittings side by side onto the aluminium strip and then bolted the conduit onto that.
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(Bottom view)[smg id=2935]
(Side view)
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(Assembled)
I drilled a hole into the inside middle of the PVC elbow to fit the wires coming from the LED fittings. I then glued the elbow onto the horizontal conduit (which now had the aluminium strip and the LED fittings bolted on to it). I made sure that everything was square and level before gluing. I then fed the wires through the elbow – but first using a short strip of heat shrink to keep the wires together and neat between the elbow and the LED fittings.[smg id=2936]
I fed the electrical cable through the hole in the switch box Making an overhand knot inside to prevent it from being pulled out) and up the vertical conduit and connected that to the LED fitting wires and fed all slack into the vertical conduit. In the socket box I made sure that there was enough slack in the wire so as to connect the positive through the switch on the socket box. I then glued the elbow on the top of the vertical conduit – again making sure that everything was square and level.[smg id=2937]
I squeezed silicon sealer onto the inside bottom of the switch box and placed the sinkers into the silicon. This gave sufficient weight to the box so that the lamp would not topple over.[smg id=2940]
I then screwed the cover onto the socket box (at this stage, the cover was attached to the cone and the vertical conduit – and attached to that was the horizontal conduit holding the LED fittings.) I then connected the cable to the transformer.
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SUBSEQUENT MODIFICATION
After a day of use, the LEDs began to flicker - and the transformer smelt like electrical burn. After a few trsts with the voltmeter, I found that the transformer was not producing exactly 12v (cheap Chinese transformer!!!. So I found an old transformer in my "I will find this useful later" stash. and it worked fine. It also fitted perfectly into the socket box - all I had to do was rearrange the sinkers and make a larger hole so that the connector for the lead from the transformer to the mains could be plugged in. Taking this int account, then the lamp only cost me about R200 - if I can recover from Mica the amount spent on the crappy Chinese transformer.
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And here is the finished product - and I am a happy man!
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