Posting this because it might be of interest to some of you'uns.
The boys were due a room remodel and between the wife and them they came to a consensus of Star Wars. Made sense to me. I recently had to give up alcohol except on special occasions due to a daily med I need to be on so I don't really have much need of keeping beer on tap in the house anymore. So I cleaned up R2, took out his kegorator parts and moved him into the boys room. They like him there.
Wife went and got sheets and wall hangings and death start lights and all kinds of whatnots but balked at paying $300 for a light up Star Wars sign from Pottery Barn. Sign is
here. She did get them the hyperdrive wall hang, which I thought was a bit pricey but is huge and very cool,
hereWife told me to make the sign. I made the sign. Materials were two 2"x8' trim pieces (got the pre-primed) a 2'x4' sheet of white board, and a can of stain black rattle can. Cut the white board down to size and framed it. Then I hung it on the wall in the shop and projected a template image I made in photoshop onto it and traced it with a sharpie
Dots are for lights.
I then taped it off and painted it up. For the lights I ordered two sets of
G-40 string lights and because I wanted my sign cooler than the PB sign I ordered a
3 channel 8-function controller.
There are places you can buy the lights in pieces but it was going to run me about $20 more all together and I already splurged on the controller putting this build ~80 all together when you add in a cheap-o light switch, a push button I had laying around, and some hanging hardware.
I took the light controller apart and soldered some leads onto the button pad and hot glued it up. Now I can run the function button to the bottom of the frame next to the power switch.
The controller has really nice posts for the channels and power so I just used the wire that came with it and wire-nutted it onto the wire that I made from the light kits I bought.
Taking the lights apart is a ---smurfette---, the bottoms really don't want to come apart from the tops but I sat down with a towel, a screw driver, and watched "Black Dynamite" and got it all done in one sitting. Then it was a matter of getting the holes drilled and everything put together.
The holes are 5/8" with a 1/4" hole drilled at the bottom of each one along the center line. I used forstner bits and drilled enough of the big hole to see the line, then drilled the small hole on the line then finished the big hole. It was a PITA but allowed the lights to sit very well in the board. Required no gluing.
Then I had to figure out my channels and put them in one channel at a time. To make it easy I marked each set of 13 on the back side post so I could tell what went where when I flipped it over and started wiring.
This is the completed back side.
And this is the completed sign.
All together it's 39 five watt bulbs. They're all 120v incandescent so that works out to 1.625 amps. Running LEDs would get me down to next to no power consumption but LED G-40 are dearly priced and for this small a draw, that isn't even on all that often, it's not an issue. They don't get hot, just warm, and they are bright as all hell when full on since it's just shy of 200 watts uncovered glaring at you, but the twinkle is really really sharp looking.