I have a fluorescent light under the shelf on the workbench that provides some additional light to the two task lights I use, but it is not as bright or as efficient as I would like like. A LED fixture would best meet that criteria, and since there are power supplies, LED’s and other components in the parts pile, building one seems like an obvious choice.
The housing will be made from a windshield wiper blade container, this particular one was from a Goodyear wiper from Costco. As a way to hold the LED’s in place and provide power, two 12 gauge copper wires were installed held in place with plastic spacers and zip ties.
There are a total of 40 LEDs in this fixture, 4 in series with a 150 ohm resister, making a total of 10 groups. Each group was soldered to the two copper rails.
One one of the end caps a couple holes were drilled for the power switch and power connector. The power connector is a PCB mount type, so it had to be held in place with hot glue. I centered it using the power supply connector and filled the area with glue. Power connections were then made to the rails.
Next, aluminum tape was added for some downward reflectivity, not sure that it really made too much of a difference. A couple hard drive magnets were taped to the light to allow for easy mounting. It looks bright in the picture, but these particular LED’s are too focused to be used in an application like this. And surprisingly, 40 LED’s is just not bright enough… time to find some better ones for lighting.
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