Gonna have to figure out how to get your wife and friends to swap out that Shadow speaker panel when you're not around.

Oh man, you should have let me know. I can probably replace it for you, I think I might have an extra.

If you wake up in the middle of the night and go "oh shit, that speaker panel is actually uglier than the translite I replaced, what was I thinking?" then just PM me, I'll see it when I wake up.

I love real neon, very impressed with some of these custom projects especially. But the vintage collecting appeal makes total sense too.

I just finished a sign project that’s cheating by the thread’s standards, it’s LED driven, but I thought I’d share because there is one big upside to this tech. Aside from cost of course. It’s something anyone with a little creativity and know how can do at home. Unlike some of this amazing glass work. I used a 3D printer to create my guides, but it could be done just by hand too.

I have to say, this LED side firing into silicone stuff is really nice. It’s not the same as the real thing, but it is remarkably convincing still. Anyways, here’s my faux neon, but in the spirit of the thread.

2748A861-0C07-43FD-9A35-BF534DCA0BFD (resized).jpeg
4948AD16-7DE0-4505-BA1F-9C8731F215BC (resized).jpeg
CBCF6589-0ED4-44A9-8315-A6555525D94D (resized).jpeg
EFE16BEA-579B-4A9C-A618-52BA04E65265 (resized).jpeg

I didn't follow a guide, but if you search for "LED neon flex" you'll find all kinds of products and resources. At the end of the day it's just an LED strip embedded in a flexible silicone strip. There are all kinds of ways to do it, but I personally designed my lettering and shapes as vector files, exported them into a format I could extrude into 3D, and printed them. Then mounted them on plywood I cut with a jigsaw. All the wiring to link things is routed through holes in the ply and across the back.

Here's what it all looked like before I started cutting and wiring the LEDs.

IMG_2822 (resized).jpg

To upload a gif you need to change the quality you're uploading with the little dropdown on the right side of the upload box. You'll see one option is PDF/GIF, which doesn't scale things and remove the animation.

The brand I've been using is Lamomo. Your signs look great, are you doing some CNC routing?

Yeah, it's really very approachable. I apologize if all this LED talk is derailing the thread, we can start a new thread for it maybe if it's messing up the vibe. And if you have the budget talking to Ryan about getting some custom glass sounds amazing. The real thing always going to look best.

But if you want a cheap way to try out your own custom ideas the end results can really really good. People who didn't know just assumed my sign was real neon. If you get up close there are tells of course, but if you're just enjoying the light it's pretty convincing.

Thanks Ryan! Yeah, that's hanging in my garage. I still have some pins on the left just outside of this shot, but these days my arcade caters more to fighting game players, I run a weekly night for ye olden Street Fighters etc.

IMG_2864 2.JPG

Was a fun project, and I learned a lot doing it. At some point I'm either going to redo it or make another one, take what I learned and make some smarter moves on the next one. Working on a different lit up sign project now, but it's not even faux neon looking, so save it for another thread.