# LED drill press light



## mattthemuppet2 (Jan 1, 2014)

so I recently came into an old but perfectly functioning floor standing drill press and as with my usual LED light obsession, I had to convert the attached light to LED. It also gave me an excuse to use my new to me bandsaw (and to use the lathe to make bearing rests for it!) and try out some different things on the lathe. LED lights are super easy to make. All you need is an LED (natch), a good thermal path to the outside air and a constant current driver that works with whatever voltage you intend to supply the light with. I have LEDs coming out of the wazoo, so that's easy, and I have an old 12V driver and a 12V wall wart from my parts bin.

First the pill (electronics will come next year). Scrap alu plate of some description (dumpster find) 
	

		
			
		

		
	




Rough cut with my bandsaw (bearing rests worked a treat!) 
	

		
			
		

		
	




Drilled for an arbor, which I really should have faced first 
	

		
			
		

		
	




Circularised, tapered to fit the light housing (ish) and polished for a good thermal interface 
	

		
			
		

		
	




After I drilled and tapped all the various holes (using my drill press, woohoo!), I re-mounted the pill to face and polish it flat 
	

		
			
		

		
	




Ta-da! For the drive current I'll be running this at, it really wasn't necessary, but I wanted to try facing and this was a good excuse. 
	

		
			
		

		
	




LED star mounted to show you what it should look like. I have to reflow the LED onto the star, but that won't take any effort 
	

		
			
		

		
	




In the light housing 
	

		
			
		

		
	




Other end. The driver will be free-floating in the space between the pill and the switch 
	

		
			
		

		
	




First thing to do, reflow the LED I wanted onto its star. I'm using a Nichia 119 LED for this light as it's bright enough, cheap as chips (~$1 each!) and has really high colour reproduction, which is always nice to have. The 119 LEDs have only 2 pads (+ and -) compared with the more normal 3 (+, - and thermal), so the stars need the central thermal pad grinding out otherwise the LED will short. Small dab of solder paste and onto my random piece of alu reflowing plate - this is mainly to stop them falling through the rings and getting scuzzed up with the dried up rice boilings over underneath. It also makes for a nice gradual heating up of the star and LED too. 
	

		
			
		

		
	




after 
	

		
			
		

		
	




The 119s are the small one, the other is an XM-L2 that I thought I trashed getting a torch apart (1st pic) but turned out to be fine when I reflowed it onto a new star (2nd pic), which I was pretty chuffed about. LED on heatsink 
	

		
			
		

		
	




Wired up to the driver, one I had lying around from an old 12V LED bulb 
	

		
			
		

		
	




Switch wired up. One wire from a spare 12V wall wart is screwed to the switch, the other passes through direct to the driver. The wire from the switch isn't wired up yet 
	

		
			
		

		
	




Everything installed in the light, with 25deg optic to focus the fairly meager output as efficiently as possible. I measured the current and it's only 170mA, so output is probably ~50lm or so. If this isn't enough, I can always use a 5V wallwart and a couple of 350mA 7135 chips, like I've done in another work light. 
	

		
			
		

		
	




Next up is making a new mount for the light. It was previously mounted on a block of wood bolted to the drill press and wired directly to the motor. I thought a more elegant solution would be to incorporate a 2 output socket into the mount, so that I could add another light on the other side in the future. I used some seriously hard mystery wood (my band saw laughed and my jig saw cried), drilled and "milled" out a cavity and various other holes, then painted it green to sort of match the drill press colour 
Next up is making a new mount for the light. It was previously mounted on a block of wood bolted to the drill press and wired directly to the motor. I thought a more elegant solution would be to incorporate a 2 output socket into the mount, so that I could add another light on the other side in the future.


I used some seriously hard mystery wood (my band saw laughed and my jig saw cried), drilled and "milled" out a cavity and various other holes, then painted it green to sort of match the drill press colour




Installed and wired up



light mounted 



close up of the light head, which I'm rather pleased with 
	

		
			
		

		
	




in action



it isn't super bright, but it's close enough that I don't think it'll matter much. It's certainly better than not having a light! Happy New Year!


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## DAN_IN_MN (Jan 1, 2014)

Nice work!

Do you have a thread on your other lights?

I've seen LED lights before.  Why do they need a driver board?  Don't LEDs light with DC?  I'm confused.  Thanks! 

I want to build one for my sewing machine.


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## mattthemuppet2 (Jan 1, 2014)

thanks! I'm not at my laptop right now to find the links but I'll do it tomorrow, I've built lots of lights  
LEDs are constant current devices and their output varies hugely with small village changes so the purpose of the driver (you're right though they are DC) is to provide exactly the current you want and in the process convert the  in coming voltage to something the led can handle. that's why I'm using a buck driver to take the 12v from the wall wart and convert it to the 3v or so that the led needs.
any questions just fire away!

- - - Updated - - -

blah bloody tablet: small village = small voltage


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## DAN_IN_MN (Jan 1, 2014)

I've got a lot of LEDs too.  I'm not sure if they'd work for something like this.  How would I know?  They were for truck tail lights.  A company I worked for made a machine to mount them to a base plate.   I saved them from the trash.


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## mattthemuppet2 (Jan 2, 2014)

Dan, they're probably surface mount low power LEDs, which are a royal pain to work with as they need to be reflowed onto an etched/ printed circuit board. I prefer discrete high power LEDs as they're much easier for a DIYer to handle and you need fewer of them to get the same amount of light.

Here's a desklamp that I use as a worklight at my bench and point at anything that I'm working on that needs a bit of illumination
budgetlightforum.com/node/22285

Here's a light bar that hangs above my lathe and covers about 2/3 of my work bench. I need to make another one for the other side of the garage 
budgetlightforum.com/node/25568

I've made too many LED lights to count, although most of them are bike lights and torches/ flashlights, so not much use for you. It's a surprisingly cheap hobby though, much cheaper than machining


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## jdedmon91 (Apr 23, 2019)

That is a neat build. I like the part of using an aluminum plate and cutting a section out and turning it round. I did that with a steel plate for my driver plate build out of steel. Also I do Delrin like that for projects that can have Center holes in. 

On lighting. I over kill my ceiling lights. I just installed 2 more LED bars above my mill. It kills two birds with one stone. More light to machine by and it helps with my videos 


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


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