Tron bike: clear plastic bike with LED edge lighting

Step 8 Adding the edge lighting

having all the led's of a single color in parallel dramatically simplifies the wiring job. there are 4 colors of wire routed all over the bike: black (ground), red (red led positive), green (green led positive), and blue (blue led positive).

I used about 200 x 5mm leds for this project, back when i did it high power led's (eg Luxeon) were very expensive. if i did something like this again i would most likely use Luxeons, it would save a lot of work on the lighting install and light up the bike just as well. it wouldn't look quite the same since it would be fewer points of light, but probably just as good anyway.

install leds like this:
- drill a hole deep enough for the led into the plastic
- jam in the led
- bend over the led leads against the frame
- strip a small area off the two wires - it is very convenient here if you have a stripping tool that does not cut the wire
- solder the two wires to the led leads
- coat everything with hot-melt glue or silicone

covering everything with glue made the wiring a lot faster since no tape or shrink-tube is needed. on the downside you can see that the glue job is a big ugly mess.

you can go back and look at all the photos to see how i just routed the 4 wires all over the frame and drilled the leds everywhere.