"Neon" light guitar


I made this light up guitar for my nephew. It uses EL wire. I used 3 layers, back is MDF, middle is black acrylic with the channel cut in it for the wire and the front is acrylic. Used standoffs and some wooden cut clips to hold it all together.

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I am betting there are lots of these cool projects in your nephew’s future. Nicely done.

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He’s had a few projects. This is a favorite though.

Cool! I love it.

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Oh hey that’s great.

If you ever want to scale it up, there are led strips that look very close to real neon tubes.

https://www.amazon.com/LED-Neon-Flex/s?k=LED+Neon+Flex

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I was looking at that the other day. I will have to try eventually. I do like the EL wire since it fits the in the channel of an 1/8" piece of material.

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So I always envisioned making acrylic standoffs that plug into a double thick 1/8" backing. I did some standoffs like this in some of my sword projects:

This image kind of gives you the idea:

image

Similarly:

(Pair of wooden dao swords)

image

It wouldn’t be hard to adapt that idea to make small subtle holders for neon strips and suspend it above the backing, just like a real neon sign.

Real neon standoffs look like this:

image

The cool thing about using acrylic with tabs that slot into a backing is that they can be rotated so that they’re always facing the correct direction, and you can make a very custom track using the inkscape “pattern along path” extension, or in simpler cases, manual alignment. Something like this:

The red path is the basic neon shape you’re going for, the black rectangles are slot cutouts, and the blue circle is the outline cut for your backer. All you’d need is to design some standoffs and slot them in (in theory).

Anyway, it’s an idea that I’ve had for ages and never gotten to, and now I’ve put it into the universe :slight_smile:

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This is great, no wonder it’s your nephew’s favourite!

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Thanks for putting that out there. I when I get some time I’ll have to give it a try. I’ll be doing a couple more dog ones soon too, so maybe I’ll try with one of those. Here’s my previous el wire project.

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Looks great!

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Yeah, you wanna go all the way down that rabbit hole. :sunglasses:

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That is so cool! I have some of the neon tubing and house numbers already cut out i need to FINISH!!

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Welcome to the community! Guitar looks great! Nice job!

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Awesome :grin:

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Very cool idea. Great execution.

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Amazing!! This looks fantastic! :clap:

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Very nice and a very original project. Can’t wait to see what you come up with next.

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Wow, that’s so cool. Welcome to the forum!

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These are both great … but I LOVE the dog!!

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This is AWESOME!! I have no idea how to do these, but I’ve been admiring them for ages (saw a really cool sneaker series)! Would LOVE to make some for my boys’ rooms.

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