Welcome to the official site of the Cuban Redneck DIY Channel, where we do cooking and grilling on Tuesdays and DIY projects on Friday! Call me crazy, but today’s post is about DIY LED Light Fixtures. By reading the title, you probably ask yourself, you can’t find anything that suits you at Home Depot, Lowe’s, eBay, or Amazon? The short answer to that is no!
You see, the LED industry never had an identity from day one! They had a good product, but how do they get consumers to buy something they are accustomed to using and buying? What they did is started to clone the existing light fixtures already existing. The idea behind it was that if you were looking for an LED light fixture to replace fluorescent, you could easily find one that pretty much looked the same but offered the advantages of LED! I should not put this out there since it is an idea that has been floating around my head for some time, but there is no reason why an LED light fixture is not available as a kit: the aluminum extrusion, two end caps, and x-amount of feet of LED strip tape.
Kits like these can be made to specific luminance, and then you let the end-user cut it to size according to the application. When I installed my Harbor Freight shop lights, I had this idea in the back of my head, but I got lazy. The Harbor Freight 5000 lumen shop light when on sale and never gave it serious consideration. The same thing happened with the Harbor Freight workbench. I figured that getting some 6 watts LED light fixture to replace the fluorescent one it came with would address my issue, but it didn’t. So, in many ways, this is a follow-up video to the Harbor Freight workbench mods video.
Building a DIY LED Light Fixture
Building a DIY LED light fixture is a lot simpler than you think! And all the components you need can be acquired on marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Wish, AliExpress, and others. You not only have an excellent opportunity to save a lot of money by taking the labor cost out of the equation, but you will be making something that suits your specific needs.
There are two components to an LED light fixture like the one I build in this video: an LED strip light and a heat sink. Yes, you can dress it up with wood and other materials, but I still recommend that you use some type of metal, preferably aluminum, to dissipate the heat.
My custom DIY LED light fixture started with the acquisition of four 3-meter, 5000K, 12 Volt LED light strips. I purchase 12-volt units on purpose. I intend to power there with my solar power system. Why 3-meters? The Harbor Freight workbenches where these are getting installed are 47 inches wide. I figured that to get the luminance I was looking for, I needed at least four layers, going back and forth. I took 47 and multiplied it by four and ended up with 94-inches converted to meters or 2.38!
With the LEDs or light source on hand, I went looking for a heat sink to mount them on. I found a nice 1-inch u-channel at Home Depot, but a four-foot section cost $16. That kind of turned me off, so I ran over to Lowe’s, where I found a 1″ X 2″ piece of aluminum extrusion perfect for my LED light fixture. These are called Screen Enclosure Frame Connectors. If you don’t know what they are, these are structural pieces from a Florida room and cost less than $12 for an eight-foot piece. That cut my cost per LED light fixture to just under $11! For the endcaps, I used some 1″ aluminum angle I had laying around. If you need to buy endcaps, consider something else from the screen patio industry. They have these pre-cut 1 X 2-inch aluminum angles called Capri clips. A pack of 10 is like $5. With all of these components on hand, it is just a matter of cutting the aluminum to size, drill the end caps, and stick the LED strips to the metal. Take a look at the video, and I hope you take something from it because if you get into long pieces like an 8 foot led light fixture, you can really save some money! Not only that, but the applications are endless, from garage lights to grow lights and even a photography studio.
