Fighting Shop Shadows with COB LEDs // Let's Make Things Build

Añadido: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]For years, I've been fighting shadows in my shop. I could buy more cheap fixtures, but I've already thrown away several inexpensive lights that stopped working. And really, that's been my experience with cheap LED lighting. 10 years ago, they seem to last for years, but now LED fixtures seem to break down much quicker. So, instead of buying another light, I want to learn how they work so that I can fix them, repair them, and upgrade them myself if something goes wrong. Today, we're going to build a giant Cobb LED lighting panel and see if I can get better control over the shadows in my work area. And yes, you are invited to this. Let's make things.

[00:00:34]When it comes to LED strips, there's really only two things that you need.

[00:00:37]The LED strips themselves and some way to power them. This guy is a little bit bigger than you'll probably need for something small. For me, it's actually still overkill, even though I'm doing something a little bit bigger. Besides this, we'll need a power cord to plug this in. Everything else is just figuring out how you want to mount the strips and shape the light. Because LED lights hate heat, and these things do get warm, you'll have to find a way to pull away that heat. The best method I found are these aluminum channel tracks.

[00:01:01]The LED strips slide inside and you have a diffuser panel that snaps over the top. If you have a low ceiling, you could probably get away with attaching the strips directly to it. Though, you'd still need to find somewhere to put the power supply. To make mine, I spent about $12 on these 1x 2 furring strips.

[00:01:17]I'll be making a simple lattice frame using half joints, but honestly, you could use a piece of plywood. These LED strips weigh almost nothing, so you really don't need much structure to support them. So, this is the core of everything you'll need. I'll have links to it all besides the furring strips in the description. I'll show you now how I make my lattice. But if you have absolutely no interest in building something like this, feel free to skip to the next chapter. You're not going to hurt my feelings. This is my lattice system. It's 48 in x 64 in. And again, I'm using the cheapest wood that I could find. The way that I'm building this is by overlapping every piece with another piece. A lot of people try to calculate the spacing while also accounting for the thickness of the board, and I think that just really complicates things.

[00:01:56]Instead, I'm just going to lay out my center marks. On my 48 in side, I have five studs. So, I'm going to space them equally at 12 in. So, we'll start here at 12, 24, and 36 right there. Then, on my 64in side, I have another five studs.

[00:02:11]So, those will land at every 16 in. 16, 32, and 48. Then, we'll come back with this half flap jig. They're really easy to make. And I found the center of my stock. And this just slides right onto that line. There's a little pin here.

[00:02:27]Press it in. Now I can move my arms forward. Press it together. And then I'll just lock these down.

[00:02:34]Now for each of my marks, I'll place that pin on there. And then I'll draw my lines.

[00:02:39]This tells me exactly where I need to make my cuts. And of course, I'm going to have to cut in a little bit to account for that line that I drew.

[00:02:48]And then on the end, I'll line this up so that there's no space between the end here and my stock. And I can draw my last line like that. I'm lazy. I really wanted to gang these all up and make all my cuts at one time, but I am using furring strips, so that's not going to work very well. All squeezed together. There's still a gap. I can push this down. So, I'm going to go ahead and cut each one individually, but I've lined these all up so that I can draw lines. across the top. So, I can do each of these individually. Because this is a shop fixture, if you can gang yours up, I would highly recommend it. Again, for me, it's just not going to be feasible with these strips. It still makes sense to clamp all these together to do this as it will straighten all the boards up.

[00:03:30]I'm using stack dos here. It's not exactly 3/4 of an inch, which is the thickness here, but I'll only need to make a couple cuts when I do this. What I need to do now is make sure that I'm halfway up. So, I'll make a cut and then we'll check it with a digital caliper.

[00:03:44]I'll set the depth by pushing down. It's about 771. Now I can try the other side.

[00:03:49]And I'm just barely a hair off. If there's a gap in the middle, that means I need to lower just a little bit. If there's not a gap at all, we've got too much space. Then we raise it.

[00:04:02]And that looks perfect right there.

[00:04:09]I've already gone ahead and attached the rest of these. I've just got two left, but it's really easy. I'm going to add a little bit of glue on the inside of these. I'll slide these in place, and I'm going to use a stapler to staple all the pieces together. If you don't have a stapler, you can always use clamps on each joint, but this is just a lot easier. And that just clamps them up so that the glue can bond together.

[00:04:33]I need to attach the aluminum tracks.

[00:04:35]So, this is what it'll look like when I'm done drilling and screwing these in.

[00:04:38]I do need to point out that this does come with clips that you can attach on the the bottom side on the frame. And then you just attach the the tracks to that, but I really wanted the tracks to give it more structural strength.

[00:04:55]For the pieces that are hanging over, I did butt four pieces in. And this is so that I can add my wiring later on.

[00:05:01]Straight out of the package, you can see that it came with this little plug.

[00:05:04]Since I'm using a larger power supply with screw terminals, we're just going to cut this off. But before we do, the LED strips have these little copper pads. There's a line right straight down the middle, and this is where it's meant to be cut, which gives you a starting point for the next strip. But instead of cutting right down the middle, I'm going to cut off to the side so that the pads are intact, which will give me more contact area, which makes soldering a little easier. When I go to cut this later on, it's going to mean that I'm going to lose this little section here, but that's okay. I really want to have a much better contact area. Now, there are solderless connectors you can use, but they're a little bulkier and more expensive. I'll leave links to those in the description if you want to check them out. I've got six tracks and all, so I need to measure out six of these that will go inside the tracks.

[00:05:46]I've got to cut this little section off right here, like I said.

[00:05:50]And there we go. Six strips all together. Each of these strips is like one long sticker. But before we attach them, we need to make sure that we clean the tracks out. I've got some rubbing alcohol here and we'll just use it to wipe the tracks down. That'll get any kind of fingerprints or grease or dust.

[00:06:05]It'll get all that off so we have a good surface to attach these to. To attach the strips, I'm going to peel off just a little section here. And I gave myself about an inch on either side. This will sit right on the top. Make sure that I'm centered.

[00:06:22]I'll lay this out straight. And then I'm just going to pull back the backing and push as I go. That will help me make sure that everything is straight. A little burnishing, pressing down is also a good thing.

[00:06:40]I'm not going to pretend like I know a lot about this, but I'm going to show you the little I know. I need a tin each one of these, the places that I've cut.

[00:06:46]So, what I'm going to do is add a little bit of a drop to the top. And then I'm going to come onto the pad, the copper pad, hold it so that there's a a good enough contact with it, and then just place my tip on the pad and pull back.

[00:07:01]And I've already got that stuck and get good contact and pull back like that. You want to make sure that you have a nice bubble when you're done so that we can add the wires later on. Before I add the wires, I was struggling to find a way to attach my switching power supply, but I'm going to show you how I did that now. I marked out my window for the fan on a scrap piece of 1/4in plywood before heading over to the drill press and drilling out the four corners, which I cleaned up with a coping saw. I carefully took off the top plate of the power supply and disconnected the fan. This all has to work when we're done. Next, I marked and drilled holes through the plywood at the drill press. I probably could have gotten away with just a couple holes, but I did four here. I added some hot glue. I was a little worried that it wasn't going to stick very well to the metal, but it did a pretty good job.

[00:07:44]Then, it was just a matter of using the plywood as a template for the holes.

[00:07:48]I used number six machine screws with two nuts on each bolt jammed together.

[00:07:53]And then it was just a matter of putting everything back together. Now to attach this, I'm just going to drill three holes and screw this on.

[00:08:01]Just like the copper pads, our wiring is going to need to be tinned as well.

[00:08:07]To tin the wire, I'm going to add a little blob of solder to the end of this. And then I'm going to take that blob and stick it right inside of the wire. Let it sit there for a second.

[00:08:17]And then I'll come back in my solder and fill it in. Looking at it from the top down, I'm just going to add my blob again. And then I'll put that right inside the wire. Let it sit there for a little bit and then come back and fill it in with solder. I'm going to attach my red to the V+ side. And then my black is going to go into the V minus. I'll use low voltage staples to attach this.

[00:08:46]Now, you can see my first track starts right here, and I want this to land right on my puddles. So, I'm going to cut it off at those puddles. In order for this to work, we need to make sure that the red wire is going to be on the plus.

[00:09:01]Now, here's a trick. You can flatten this a little bit, which makes it, I think, a little bit easier to attach it.

[00:09:07]We'll add a puddle, and then just put them together. We'll give it a couple seconds to cool off, and that one's done.

[00:09:17]Now I can place this inside the track and I don't have to worry about going around the edge. These are smooth.

[00:09:37]Now that the wiring's done, it's time to add the diffusers to the top of the tracks. And these actually go on pretty easily. They just snap in place.

[00:09:45]Finally, I need to be able to plug mine in. If yours came with a cord, you're a lot better off than I am. But I've got my ground here, my neutral, and my live, which is green, white, and black.

[00:10:01]I've got everything else turned off and let's see what this looks like.

[00:10:05]But the real test is how does it look over the table saw? I've already installed this with my son. I kind of saved myself a little embarrassment putting this up, but this is what it looks like above my table saw. My light turns on over here.

[00:10:18]And there it is. This is what my camera would look like if I didn't have any other lights on. It's pretty dark, pretty dim. I used to turn up the exposure a lot for people to be able to see, but I did add some box lights over time, and I'll show you what that looks like. Over the last 5 years, this is what a lot of my videos look like.

[00:10:34]Sometimes a little bit brighter on this side, definitely darker over here. I've got a light over here and I've got a light over here that lights everything up. But now, let me show you what it looks like when I turn the overhead lights on. And here we are with the LED lights. I like this because I don't get a lot of shadows from the light over here. And everything's just more spread out. I've got light on this side. I've got light over from my router table.

[00:10:57]It's much better as a woodworker, as someone who's trying to light something up for other people to see. That also is a benefit. I could have bought some cheap LED lights over the top, but I really think that this spreads out my light a lot better. And if there's ever a problem, I know how to fix it. One thing I don't like about this is that you can hear the fan running right now.

[00:11:14]And that's actually pretty loud. So, in the future, I'm going to probably want to find some way of fixing that. They do make other types of power supplies that use that don't use fans, but they're a little bit more expensive. Thank you so much for watching, and let me know what you think about all this. Is this something that you would build yourself in your own shop? I'd like to thank my patrons that keep this work going. If you'd like to be a patron yourself, I have a link in the description. And remember to keep making things.