Part 3: Light Rigs

For this part you will need the following items..

1. Flexible Handicap Parking Sign 
2. Plastic Super Glue
3. 3m Outdoors Double Stick Tape
4. Color Gels
5. Exacto Knife
6. PCB's from the last post.
7. Automobile Pin striping 
8. Mr. Clean Magic Eraser Foam 
9. Aluminum Bracket (Lowes/Make sure it can be bent easily)
10. T-Nuts and Screws

Using a few measurements from the helmet I drew up a simple plan in AutoCAD that would fit my helmet. If you're using one of Pinski's helmets, email me and I'll be glad to send you the file for this. If not, these plans will not work for your helmet.

Sketch the plans on the back side of the handicap sign and cut out the base of the rig. After the rig is cut out, start bending it at each bar until it matches the curve of your helmet. This bend is very important so make sure to get it right. I learned the hard way and ended up rebending the rig in these pictures.

(Example of how much bend you should end up with)

Start constructing the skeleton of the rig using measured strips, cut from the handicap sign. 

Paint the inside of the rig with a silver metallic spray paint for maximum brightness. I found that there is really no noticeable difference in doing this, so this step is optional.

To secure each board to the rig I backed them with the 3m Doublestick tape. This method works well to hold the boards down and allows them to be adjusted easily if necessary. 

Start cutting strips of the Magic Eraser Foam to fit into each bar. A lot of other helmets I have seen seem to get this part wrong. The point of this step is to diffuse the light of the LED's so that you get even light flow over the color gels. This will make the lights look 100 times better trust me. 

Now start cutting your color gels to fit over the foam. These do not have to be perfectly straight and may overlap for now. Glue each gel down using the plastic super glue. The pattern for the colors follows the order of the spectrum.

PURPLE

BLUE

LIGHT BLUE

GREEN

LIGHT GREEN

YELLOW

ORANGE

RED

Straighten out the bars by outlining them with the automobile pin-striping. This will give them a finished look.

Hook up the connections and test out the lights. (You may want to do this before pin striping the edges) Adjust the foam to fix low light areas.

To fix the rig to the helmet you'll need the aluminum brackets and T-nuts. 

Start by cutting off 4 pieces of aluminum about 5 or 6 inches. Drill holes in the ends of each before you start bending. Take the T-nuts and find a flat place on the top and bottom of the inside of your helmet to fix them to. I found that sanding the area and super gluing the T-nuts to the helmet worked best. (Epoxy does not stick well to the surface of the helmet) 

Now start bending the aluminum so it fits flat on the back of the rig and connects to the T-Nut. To hold the brackets onto the rig I used the same 3m Double stick tape. Tighten the screws and adjust if needed.

Put on the visor to make sure the light bars do not interfere with it. Also, check if the bars are even. This should give you a good idea of what the finished lights will look like.

END PART 3: LIGHT RIGS