Hey all, been a while!
Since I'm quite busy with work and prepping for vacation I figured, why not stress myself out some more,
I had been wanting to do this for a loooong time, suddenly, the idea just popped back into my head and I said f*ck it, let's try!
I started by sketching up what i had in mind:
Usually it takes me a little longer to figure things out but this time I just put on my dancing shoes and sent it.
Got straight to cutting up one of the spare tails I had lying around that were collecting dust for years now
I started with making cardboard templates for the translucent plastic I was going to use, make sure it all fits. I did change the layout from the original idea a little bit.
Bought some regular "bright" LED's, figured i'd string them up in series and power them with 12 volts, (each LED uses about 2 volts, so having six of them evens the voltage out nicely.)
The next challenge was getting the "glow" I had in mind.
I made this testing base from cardboard and stuck the LED's in, then I made a little reflector plate from a piece of spraycan (ghetto as hell, i know. But it's spraycan, not spraycannot!)
Also sanding down the LED's made them give off a more diffuse light. I later sanded down all of them, you'll see why.
Okay so now the electronics were partially figured out, and I had a good idea of what I wanted to do. Time to get hacky.
Cut away the material where the reflector used to sit. Don't need that!
Cut out some translucent plastic and started bending it with some heat. (It's alot harder than it initially sounds, getting the right shape without the plastic warping all over the place is quite difficult.
Here I noticed that sanding the LED's down and using the reflector plate created the desired glow. Sanded them all down.
Almost there! I really want a nice, even spread of light. This will be achieved by moving the LED's further back into the housing.
This is the main thing right now, these leds are not bright enough. I want to use this strip as a brakelight as well, so the idea is to undervolt the LED's when lit normally, and when pressing the brake pedal we will have the LED's at their normal working voltage to increase brightness. I will be using brighter LED's for this, still scavenging the internet for something a little more beefy.
Of course sacrifices had to be made in the name science. Poor fella's...
Put some rubber material around the metal reflector plate, this will avoid short circuits.
More sacrifices... made a new one!
This one fit even better!
Now, let's focus on the blinkers:
Cut the shape once more, since I had warped the other one I was a bit more careful (these take so incredibly long to get right with all the cutting, bending, filing and sanding)
Finally managed to get it into a good shape. This was the progress after about 2 days, i have some more ideas that I don't have pictures of yet, but I'll show you all soon!