After moving into our new apartment, Jill and I thought that a light bar would help us to make use of the limited space surrounding the bed. The idea was to get rid of our bedside lamps and use the light bar for reading instead, thus avoiding the need for bedstands. We eventually eschewed that idea, but we still made the light bar for…reasons. In fact, we made two.
The lightbars consist of PVC pipe, cut into sections and attached to the walls via 3D printed brackets. I don’t have pictures of it, but I made a simple jig to but the PVC axially on a table saw. Here is a photorealistic render:
The light comes from LED strips driven by plug-in 12V power supplies. The lightbar above the bed also has a “dimmer” – which is really just a tunable buck converter that’s had its trimming pot replaced with a larger, single-turn potentiometer. It works ok, though the actual dimming range is quite narrow relative to the range of the potentiometer. That said, I think it works well for the effort.
The brackets took the most work to make by far. After trimming away the supports, I used bondo to fill the gaps between the lines in the first layer. Then came copious sanding, priming, and more sanding before painting (sanding between layers, of course). Jill helped a lot with this process. The final product wasn’t perfect, but I thought it looked a lot like they had been cast, which is what I wanted in the first place.
If I had to do this again, I would use a resin printer for the brackets. I understand that not everyone has access to a resin printer, so I think it’s still useful to know how to post-process FDM parts in this way. Nonetheless, the amount of effort required to get a smooth surface was more than I imagined, and given the opportunity to circumvent it, I would absolutely take it.
Even though we don’t use the lightbar in the bedroom for reading so much, it’s still useful, as it adds a ton of light to the room. And the one over the stove is indispensable – while I would love a proper range hood, the added light alone helps a lot. We will just have to be careful about making and clearing smoke.