LED Lamp From a Chocolate Box and an Old TV Diffuser

I made this lamp from a round tin box from Max Brenner chocolates that I received on my birthday from my family, a plastic diffuser sheet from an old LED TV screen, a piece of 50mm plastic tube, two round pieces of wood, three corks for legs, two screws with nuts, and a cap from a whisky bottle to decorate the upper screw. The only thing I bought especially for this project was a 5m LED strip.

I wanted to make this project with my five year old grandson, so I decided that the building process must be as simple as possible.

1. A round (~18cm in diameter) tin box from Max Brenner chocolates. It's very beautiful, I wanted to use it for something from the moment I got it for my birthday present.

2. A sheet of light diffusing plastic film I took from an old 40 inch LED TV. When I have to throw some old device, I use to arrange a "teardown session" for my grandchildren to show them what the things are made of. Old LED screens are a source of many useful things - from small screws to speakers and large sheets of polarizing film and light diffusing plastic.

3. A piece of 50mm plastic tube for the central "backbone" of the lamp.

4. Two round plugs for the ends of the tube that I made from a piece of wooden plank.

5. Two screws with nuts to assemble all the thing.

6. Three tapered corks bought for some children's school project

7. A cork with a cap from a whisky bottle to decorate the upper screw.

I bought a LED strip with controller and remote on Aliexpress. There are different types of LED strips, I decided to buy an "RGB CCT" because besides color LEDs it has dedicated LEDs for cold and warm white, and I wanted the lamp to have a real white light. The strip is self-adhesive so it is very simple to glue it on the central tube.

The easiest way to find the centers was to draw circles of right diameters in Inkscape, to print them and to cut them out, then place the circles in the box and mark the holes.

I drew also the holes for ventilation; but the LEDs are so efficient that the lamp gets only a little warm. I drilled the ventilation holes only in the bottom and stopped because I thought - maybe it will be OK without holes in the lid. And indeed, there's no need for them.

I used a 50mm cup drill for drilling big holes. In this case I needed "the inside" of the holes. The round pieces of wood that I got were a little bigger than the inner diameter of the tube so I used an angle grinder to reduce their diameter. I fixed the plugs in the drill chuck, and they were spinning all the time in order to grind them evenly; I held the grinder disk an some angle to make the plugs a little conical.

Then I widened a little the holes in the plugs for the screws and glued the nuts with epoxy putty to the inner sides of the plugs. Before this I drilled small holes a few millimeters deep for the putty to hold better.

I glued one of the two plugs into the tube with epoxy glue (the nut inside). When the glue hardened, I assembled the box and the tube, put the plastic diffuser sheet into the box and marked the needed height of the tube.

Then I cut the tube to this size and glued in the second plug.

I wanted to roll the strip around the tube so that it would fill all the length of the tube above the box.

I knew that 5m strip on 50mm tube would be OK because:

- the length of one round is pi*50mm = 157mm (or a little more because of the angle of the strip on the tube);

- so the number of the turns will be approximately 5m / 160mm = 31;

- with the pitch of 10mm (the width of the strip) it will fill 31*10mm = 31cm;

- I needed to fill a few centimeters more so I had to leave 1-2mm between the turns.

Of course, first I tried to roll the strip without gluing it, then I removed 10-15cm of the protective film from the adhesive layer on the upper end of the strip and started to roll it around the tube removing more pieces of the protective film. Then I fixed the wires in the end of the strips with plastic zip ties, connected the controller and fixed it on the tube too.

The LEDs of each turn are not exactly under those of the previous turn, so they form a beautiful spiral pattern!

I had to make a hole in the box for the 12V plug and to fix the plug somehow inside the box. So I drilled the hole and formed a supporting "shelf" for the plug from the epoxy putty. I made two holes for zip ties in the "shelf" in order to fix the plug. I also cut out a piece of the diffuser plastic from its bottom edge to make some space for the plug.

I glued three corks to the bottom of the lamp for the legs.

Then I took a cap from a whisky bottle cork and made a knob on the head of the upper screw with epoxy putty.

In my case the sheet of the diffuser plastic forms almost two turns inside the box. I wanted to fix its edge by means of two-sided adhesive tape. But the plastic of the diffuser is springy and the tape wouldn't hold it well. So I glued it with short pieces of the tape and with epoxy glue between the pieces.