~ Easy Articulating Convertable Spot/Flood Light Lamp ~

by eltigre

2.4K256

Intro: ~ Easy Articulating Convertable Spot/Flood Light Lamp ~

We needed a few bright spotlights to shine on our 3d printer platter and not blind the monitoring camera. After several long searches on the interwebs, nothing bright enough or flexible enough was available at a reasonable cost so we just MacGyverd one together. We wanted to be able to adjust the height, angle and use it as a flood or spot light. Our cost was under $10 each because we reused a lot of wire and bulbs so here we go...

STEP 1: Make the Lamp Base

You need some kind of a base to hold your lamp steady. We decided on designing a custom base in Tinkercad (a free CAD design browser software) so the lamp cord hides neatly underneath (image 2). You could just make your house wire long enough to form a coil and that would be plenty strong enough to support the bulb and socket above it. As an alternative, you could also use a scrap of wood about 12cm square and a few wire holding staples or glue to fix the house wire to the wooden base.

The lamp base .stl (CAD design file) is attached in case you wish to use that. If so, download the file, adjust it to the size you prefer and slice it with 3d printer slicer software to generate Gcode for your printer. We use Prusa Slicer for our Prusa MK3 printer which works fine. The type of plastic filament you use won't matter as the base is not exposed to any heat (if LED bulbs are used) and little weight above it. Our base is made of ABS because that's what we had loaded on the printer at the time. The 12cm diameter base seems to be perfect to hold this lamp steady.

STEP 2: Assemble the Lamp

Take your house wire and strip both ends. Disassemble the lamp socket and screw the house wire onto the socket terminals and reassemble it.

Push the other end of the house wire through the printed lamp base and use the 2 butt connectors to attach (crimp on) the house wire to the lamp cord securely. Safety first with electricity, so make sure the connections are tight and no bare wires are touching each other or sticking out the back end of the socket or connectors.

Fold the wire so the connections fit neatly into the base arm with the tunnel (image 2). Hot glue the connections into the base arm tunnel taking care not to let the glue or wires protrude below the base. Hot glue is not required, you can use any glue that works for you as long as it is non conductive. Epoxy or silicon sealant could also be used if you prefer or even just wrap it up with vinyl electrical tape to hold the wires in place. We used hot glue so that we didn't have to wait for glue to dry.

STEP 3: Make a Slip on Shade

If you only want a flood light, you can skip this step because your lamp is now ready to screw in a bulb and plug in. However, if you want a spot light option convertable from the same lamp you need to make a slip on friction shade.

Contrary to popular belief, LED bulbs do get hot. Not like old school incandescents hot, but their base does get up to about 80c when operating. Likely not enough to ignite cardboard but, for safety, we elected to use a strip of aluminum (image 3), as a slip on shade that directs the light outwards in a spot pattern.

Making the aluminum shade is very easy, just roll the strip into a tube tightly around the bulb and tape it together with some aluminum high heat duct tape (image 4). You could staple or glue it together if you prefer but the duct tape makes it fast, easy and secure. Now you can slip the shade on and off depending on the type of light you need (spot or flood). The tube stays firmly in place by friction only. We cut an 8cm x 22cm piece of aluminum left over from some larger roof flashing with a pair of large scissors, but you could just cut the ends off a soda can, cut the can open along its length, cut the edges straight, then wrap and tape it as described above. You could also use some baking tinfoil, because it's heavier than the regular type, and fold it a few times to stiffen it up and that would also work although it wouldn't be as sturdy. Careful working with thin metal, it can bite you like a cobra (for real and I have the scars to prove it...).

Now you are done. Slip on the shade, plug in your lamp and bend the house wire to aim the spot light up or down and turn the base left or right as you desire. Once you have it aimed just right, turn on your webcam and you are ready for your closeup Mr. DeMille ;)

This works so well I made 2 for the lab and another for use in the garage. The small size and ability to aim it makes it excellent as a work light under the hood, inside and under the car and the shade keeps it from blinding you as you work next to it. Enjoy.

5 Comments

schreib 1 year ago

I have used CAD before, years ago before retiring. Nowadays, it appears simpler and more powerful versions are available, even for free as you indicate with TinkerCAD. Amazing. Also amazing is the ability you showed in the 3D display, able to rotate your drawing using my cursor on my Mac.
Nice job with this simple light fab!
Questions:
1) Is TinkerCAD relatively easy to learn and use? Can I print drawings from it on a standard printer? Is it capable of exporting dxf files?
2) I have often wanted to make some simple things like you and many other younger makers do but do not own a 3D printer. Are there sources out there on the big interweb where I can contract with independent contractors, makers to make what I design in CAD? and what file format is most universal in 3D CAD if I was to do so?
thanks!

eltigre 1 year ago

Hi Schreib.
Tinkercad is very easy to learn and free to use. It is an in browser graphics based CAD so what you see is what you get with 0.01mm accuracy. It gives you some basic shapes to drag & drop on your workplane to get you started and then has some very nice tools to manipulate the shapes (e.g place a ruler on the workplane and base everything you design off of a fixed reference using either midpoint or endpoint, then group your shapes into a model) Once you practice with it for a few hrs. you are away to the races. Not as versatile as a full cad program like fusion360 or freecad (I miss the ability to go back in a list of actions and change the dimension on just a single hole for e.g.) but using the Tinkercad group/ungroup commands you can work pretty fast once you get some practice. I have designed hundreds of 3d printed models with Tinkercad. I keep trying to move to freecad or fusion 360 but the learning curve seems to be holding me back so I always seem to default to Tinkercad. Just try it, you will like it, hundreds of how to tutorials are on youtube from intro to pro. You can print drawings on a standard printer. Tinkercad supports direct download of the image into *.png format or you can do as I do and use a screen capture of the portion of the image you desire. You can export (download) *.obj *.glb & *.stl files for 3d printing and *.svg files for laser cutting. It won't export *.dxf file format directly but there are some online converters that should give you a dxf file out of one of the above file formats. There are thousands of online 3d printer sites on the web that will happily print a model for you. They should all be able to work with either *.obj *.glb & *.stl file formats. I personally use .stl but it shouldn't matter which format you prefer.
Happy modelling ;)

schreib 1 year ago

Wow, sounds good to me. Next time I will try this out, download and play a bit for now. I was thinking if it could export dxf I could "tinker" a bit then fine tune in my old CAD package. . . but that would defeat the purpose if I need to have one of those specialty files to 3D print in the end-- unless my old CAD can export one(doubtful).
thanks again.

seamster 1 year ago

This is really clever, both the idea to use stiff wires as a power-conducting adjustable arm, as well as the simple slip-on shade. This is a excellent!