So I originally had one regular red LED hooked up, I'd planned on using it for power indicator or something. But I realized I hadn't done anything with the site...
I originally just drilled a hole and stuck the red LED up in there, but the direction of the light wasn't spectacular, and I needed something that would illuminate cast acrylic (reason and explanation as to why I needed cast acrylic is below)... I went to see if I could mod it with two LED's, but alas I was all out of red's, except for a batch of super tiny surface mount LED's (when I say tiny I mean seriously tiny, 1mm x .5mm) rediculously small, I'd got them by accident instead of regular LED's (wasn't paying attention when ordering). I've soldered surface mount before but never this small, but I figured they'd be easy to tuck away, I was right.
I wanted to do something kind of special with it, my buddy has a laser engraver so I knew I wanted to use cast acrylic (it catches light a lot better than regular acrylic when being lit). So we had a little creative planning session, I knew I wanted to do something like a gears logo reticle, so I bought a gear generating application (I'd wanted to get it anyway to make stuff with my soon to be built CNC mill).. Anyway I showed him the GOW gear logo I'd created and he went crazy in corel draw churning out reticle's.
So which one looks best?
This one?
Or this one?
And finally all finished and screwed together (just need to add the detail/screw covers)...
I originally just drilled a hole and stuck the red LED up in there, but the direction of the light wasn't spectacular, and I needed something that would illuminate cast acrylic (reason and explanation as to why I needed cast acrylic is below)... I went to see if I could mod it with two LED's, but alas I was all out of red's, except for a batch of super tiny surface mount LED's (when I say tiny I mean seriously tiny, 1mm x .5mm) rediculously small, I'd got them by accident instead of regular LED's (wasn't paying attention when ordering). I've soldered surface mount before but never this small, but I figured they'd be easy to tuck away, I was right.
I wanted to do something kind of special with it, my buddy has a laser engraver so I knew I wanted to use cast acrylic (it catches light a lot better than regular acrylic when being lit). So we had a little creative planning session, I knew I wanted to do something like a gears logo reticle, so I bought a gear generating application (I'd wanted to get it anyway to make stuff with my soon to be built CNC mill).. Anyway I showed him the GOW gear logo I'd created and he went crazy in corel draw churning out reticle's.
So which one looks best?
This one?
Or this one?
And finally all finished and screwed together (just need to add the detail/screw covers)...
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