Hi guys in this video I'm going to show you how to make this fantastic led Star Wars sign
The materials that I've used are: An A4 sheet of clear acrylic.
This is 3mm thick which is about one eighth of an inch.
An A4 sheet of gloss black acrylic, again 3mm thick.
A yellow led strip light tape. You can get these in various lengths or cut them to length at the marked positions.
I have also used some kitchen foil and three pieces of square planed wood.
To etch the design on the acrylic sheet I've used a Dremel engraver tool
First of all I downloaded a font called SF Distant Galaxy,
which is freeware and similar to the Star Wars font.
I'll put a link to that in the description.
So I have just double clicked on it and installed it.
Then I ran the paint program.
I setup the page by going to print and then page setup.
I set the paper size to A4.
The orientation to landscape.
I set all of the margins to zero and the horizontal and vertical centering on.
Then I went into properties
and set the units to centimeters the width to 29.69
and the height 20.98
Once the paint size was setup correctly, I went into the text tool,
selected the SF Distant Galaxy Font
and a font size of 72.
Then typed in Star Wars.
Then I resized the text to 200%.
I opened the text tool again.
this time setting the font to impact with a size of 48.
Then added the force awakens with double spacing.
Then I just re-positioned everything.
and then it wasn't quite big enough, so I resized it by 120%.
Finally I lengthened and a few of the characters.
I joined the S and the T and the R and the S
and then it was ready for printing.
To make the stencil
I printed out the design onto some thin cardboard
and then cut out the letters with a very sharp knife.
i also reinforced some of the edges of the letters with parcel tape.
Firstly I removed the protective coating from the back of the clear acrylic sheet
Taped on the stencil and then taped on the LED light strip
And the reason for this is it makes it much easier to see where your engraving.
During the engraving, I used a ruler to make sure I had nice straight lines.
To engrave the insides I used the cut out cardboard letters.
Mark the corners and then use the ruler to fill in the lines
I followed the stencil and engraved the rest of the pattern.
It took about an hour in total.
And that was it done!
The base is quite simple, it consists of three pieces of wood glued together to form a slot
with the LED strip in the center.
First of all I cut the two side pieces of wood to the same width as the acrylic sheet
which was 297mm. Then I cut the base piece 40mm longer.
Next I used the router to remove an edge from the two side pieces.
The reason for doing so was that the LED tape was wider than the acrylic sheet and it allowed for some clearance.
To improve the finish, I sanded the wood with 240 grit sandpaper.
Then I applied wood glue to the base of one of the side pieces.
Stuck it onto the base.
Clamped it in place.
Wiped away the excess wood glue and then left it to dry.
Once it was dry I glued foil to the side to reflect light.
An alternative is to use self adhesive foil tape. And then I did the same again for the other side.
To finish the would I gave it a clear coat of varnish.
I removed the backing from the LED tape and stuck it in place
I removed the protective coverings from both of the acrylic sheets
and placed them onto the base, with the clear sheet over the LED strip.
Then I used clamps to hold the rear piece of wood in place.
I drilled some pilot holes through the base of the wood into the side piece
and then secured it with screws.
So that's the base finished!
All I need to do now is plug the leds into a 12 volt power supply.
So thanks for watching.
Please comment, like and subscribe and see you next time.