Tractor hood coffee table w/lights

fixerupper

Well-known Member
This must be the afternoon to get the projects done. LOL Anyway coffee table is done with headlights that light up. The lights can be removed by taking out two carriage bolts and pulling four staples. I hemmed and hawed about powering the lights by battery or wall plug in and I finally decided to plug them into the wall. Went to Radio Shack and got a 110V AC to 12V DC TRansformer that has 500 MA capacity. These lights draw no more than 100 MA together so I'm plenty safe. I tried fully assembling the headlights and putting the LED across the socket where the headlight bulb goes but the LED was too close to the headlight Lense and only lit up a little 2 1/2 inch circle thru the headlight lense so I ended up removing the headlight reflector and sticking the LED in the back of the headlight shell. I had to spray the inside of the headlight shell with rattle can chrome paint first to make a silver background behind the headlight lens. When the LED is not lit up the silver background makes the lense look brighter. When the interior of the shell was painted black the lens looked black. The lights are a little too bright but a piece of tinted plastic could be put over the LED to tame it down.

Here are the final pictures.
mvphoto16586.jpg


The the lights will make you see spots if you look straight at them but at night with the room lights turned off they don't give off much light.
mvphoto16587.jpg


The two LED's and transformer. $40 for everything including shipping for the lights.
 

Wow - that is a fancy paint job, Nice work.

You should be able to put a resistance in series with the leds to dim them. If the LEDs draw 100 ma, I would try a 60 ohm resistor. You can adjust from there to get the level of brightness you desire.
 

The paint is a layered three color base-clear. With today's modern paints any old hack like me can make it look good. LOL. Can LEL's be dimmed? My LED education is very elementary but the experience I've had with them is they are either bright or dead with very little dimming. I have had LED flashlights that dimmed but as I understand they were dimmed by pulsing. Can anything
like pulsing be done with these lights?
 
Instead of a resistor, why not put in a Variable
Potentiometer, then you could dial it up or down
however you want.

:>)
 
Hold on there DEN. Something we ALL forgot. Local flea market or toy show. Pock up a little used toy train transformer with DC output. Variable all over the place. I even forgot till now. DUH Jeffcat
 
(quoted from post at 17:47:23 02/21/15)
......."Can LEL's be dimmed? My LED education is very elementary but the experience I've had with them is they are either bright or dead with very little dimming. I have had LED flashlights that dimmed but as I understand they were dimmed by pulsing. Can anything
like pulsing be done with these lights?

I am not familiar with pulsing, to dim leds. Maybe someone else will comment. Some led flashlights use a voltage regulation circuit to maintain the brightness as the battery output drops. In this case it may be problematic to dim the led with a simple resistor. I have a 2 AAA cell Energizer led penlight that is my constant companion. I just checked it using one AAA cell and verified it dimmed, (I don't know if it has voltage regulation). In my experience, Leds typically respond similar to incandescent bulbs; they dim as the voltage is reduced.
 

Bob PWM I is what I thinking only I'm not enough of a techie to understand how it works. A few years ago I had a dimable LED flashlight, probably the first LED I owned. I was unloading corn at night that fall and I noticed when I beamed the flashlight at the corn with the flashlight dimmed the flowing corn appeared to have a halting flow. When the flashlight was on bright the corn appeared to flow smoothly. Somewhat later I read on this site about the pulsing or pulse width modulation used to dim an LED. if I remember right these LED's I used on this table have a range of 9-15 volts. I don't know how dim they would be before they quit working when the voltage dropped below 9v. Thank you for the link.
 
Yep. The LED lights can have a "strobe effect" if operated in a pulsed power mode.
 

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