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Hi all,

I'm new to this site so this is my first Instructable. I'm studying Interior design in Brussels, i'm in my second year now.
I made this LED-lamp. I found an accordeon cloak rack, and tought it would be nice if I could make a lamp out of it. Unfortunately the lamp is static, it's hard to change the position of the lamp (i mean making it wider or smaller).
This is the reason why I share this with you guys, so someone can help me, give me ideas and hopefully together
we can get to a goodworking accordeon lamp.

Step 1: Materials

To make this lamp you will need:

1 MDFboard (Medium-density fibreboard)
20 nuts and bolts
some spray paint
a U-profile for led-strips
LED-strips
Electrical wire

Step 2: Cut the Mdf Board

I used a board with a thickness of 5mm
You need 8 slats of 300x35x5mm and 8 slats of 167.5x35x5mm
So just start drawing all the pieces you need on
the mdf-board and cut them out with a jig saw.
After you have all the pieces you can also begin to drill the holes
needed to put everything together.
To help you i created a file, so you can see what to draw and where to drill holes.

LEDlamp.pdf
Download

Step 3: Cut the U-profile and LED-strip

The second step is cutting the profile and the LED-strip
I used 4 pieces of 250mm long.
So in this case a U-profile of 1000mm is enough.
You can choose to put more LEDs on the accordeons if you want,
I chose to put LED's only in the middle of the structure.
Use a metal saw to cut the pieces of aluminium profile.
I ordered it in a electronic store where they sell accessories for LED.
The LED profile came with a plastic topping that diffuses the light so
you don't see points of light. I also drilled holes at each end of the profiles,
except the last one that needed only one hole, to fit the electrical wire through.

For the LED-strips i bought a pack that included a tranfso and plug, already installed.
It was a strip that you can cut every 50mm so i cut pieces of 200mm to fit in the 250mm profiles.
With the profiles their was the posibility to order plugs that come at the end.
Pretty handy, so i ordered 8 plugs and used them to attach the profiles to the accordeons by
drilling holes to them so the nuts fit trough the hole. This way i didn't need any glue or other to attach the profiles,
wich saved me time and money.

Step 4: Solder the Wires to the LED-strips

Once you have every piece you need, it's time to
solder the wires. If you never did this before don't worry, it's not that hard
and here's a link that explains everything with images: http://www.doityourself.com/stry/h2weld
Just make sure your wires don't cross from - to +
Electrical wire is made of 2 wires that generally come in two different colours so it's easier for
you to know on wich side to solder it.
What i did to solder the wires was, first solder a wire on one side of each LED-strip,
then u place these LED-strips in the profiles, fit the wire into the hole and then solder the strips together.
After a quick test to see if it works it's getting time to assemble everything.

Step 5: Assembling the Lamp

After these steps you should be ready to assemble everything.
these LED-strips have a glue-side, so make sure to glue them to the profile
so they can't move, if any wire touches the aluminium profile, you could get a shock
by touching one of them if they make contact with wires.
To be sure that these wires didn't move, i used a silicone paste to keep them in place.
After this proces you can plug in the lamp and normally it should work.

Step 6: Help Me Improve My Lamp

If i put this Instructable online, it's to get constructive comments.
So i hope the design is appreciated and i hope that my instructions were okay.
Sorry if my phrases or such aren't correct.
So i hope putting this online will help me improve my lamp.
Open for suggestions!

That's all,
thanks all