Expert Wood working

Christmas Lights Project

Im helping a long time friend make a lighted Christmas Star for his fantastic holiday lights display. The original idea came from here, but I redrew the plan with SketchUp and made it a bit bigger. This is my plan.




It is longer and uses a few more lights (206). I used the dimensions and angles from the drawing to put the layout lines on a sheet of 0.75" plywood. I used the EZ Smart Rail system to cut and rout the basic star from the plywood (sorry, no pictures).

I developed a method to mount the light sockets that he uses. This was not straight forward, because the main body of the sockets is a truncated cone with a slight taper (0.74-0.79"), but it has a protrusion (0.33" wide) on one side that allows for the side contact for the bulb. This is what I came up with.



I drill a 1.0" in diameter holes in the plywood. I cut a 0.37" slot on the side of 0.75" inside diameter rigid PVC electrical conduit. I then cut it into 0.5" sections to go into the holes. The socket fits into the hole with the protrusion in the slot. When the socket is pushed flush with the face of the plywood and the adapter flush with the back side of the plywood, the socket is held firmly in place.

I planned to have the sockets 2.0" apart. This means drilling 206 1.0" holes. The hole are in straight lines, but not always along an edge, and they are mostly too far from the edge to use a drill press. Quite a while ago, I started planning an in-line drilling jig for the EZ rail. This project pushed me to finalize the plan and finish building the jig.


The drawing above shows what I came up with. A spring loaded indexing pin is mounted to the side of the SRK. The index jig clamps to the guide ridge of the Guide Rail and has evenly spaced holes that the index pin drops into. Here the setup is being used to drill the Christmas Star holes.


Note the futile attempt at corralling all the wood chips that drilling a 1" hole creates (the white stuff around the router). The blue tape on the indexer helps to see the index holes in the picture. I quickly discovered that if I left the bit plunged in the last hole, I could loosen the clamps and rotate the whole jig to line up with the next line of holes. Having two SRKs lets me have the router on one and the other set up as a alignment guide. With the bit the hole I can use the alignment guide to line up the rail parallel to the line at the proper distance.


Here Im lifting the knob to raise the indexing pin. Once it is lifted, I just have to move the SRK a little bit and I can let go of the knob. The pin will drop into the index hole as I pass it, and I m ready to drill the next hole.



It took about four hours to drill all 206 holes. Now I just have to cut 206 adapters. Here is the star with the holes drilled.




Next Ill paint it black. I have to design the roof mounting frame and a frame to fasten to the back of the star for attaching to the mounting frame. Then we can start inserting sockets and adapters, and then my friend can have fun wiring it. Ill post more when the project is done.