Did it take long to build?

All i can say is WOW......that sucker is bright.

Which is why my favourite tool is an angle grinder...

Mines a Dremel with a sander barrel at the front.  Hmmmmmmm that sucker is bright, you might think of just using one led per side.

So bought an angle grinder. Just remember to wear eye protection.

Iron filings in the eye rust and stick to the eyeball and have to be lifted off with a needle. This is about as little fun as it sounds.

Believe me, I know.

Okay......they just look bright.  Is there any way you can put a colored filter over the leds.  Might be awesome if a color were to show.

charlestt wrote:

No reason why you couldn't put a colored filter behind the lense..

Construction and Use Regulations?

My father has a copy along with the essential commentary on it produced by Grampian Police and issued nationally. I have a feeling that for road use lights for number plates have to be white. And not bright enough to upset speed cameras. Will check. Which is a tedious business as it takes 22 pages to say that on traffic lights, the red light goes on the top, the amber one in the middle and the green one on the bottom.

You might want to find some aluminum.....

charlestt wrote:

True but a filter on them would be ok if used for show purposes..

 

I need to re-look at the heatsinks i had to cut down the ones i used buy about 1/4 so im afraid that wont be sufficient, I have some iron bar in the garage about the right size anyone know if that would be ok to use..

Power shouldn't be a problem - attach a suitable sized fan to the heatsink. What sort of temperatures are they running at? Try to avoid little fans - they are annoyingly loud. 

Does the hot air have anywhere to go? Ventilation (in a way that doesn't allow water to get inside) might be all that's needed. Or a bigger resistor - turn the current and brightness down a bit, less heat to lose.

In still air I've run a rather inefficient 5W led on the heatsink of an old Pentium chip with no forced cooling.

If you can get thermal contact with the boot lid, you have a most excellent heatsink of rather enormous size. I'd be tempted to cut the fins off and get the heatsink as tightly in contact with the boot lid as possible. Using a thin layer of heatsink goo and some means of holding the LEDs in place.

Actually, I'd probably just use it to see what happened, easy enough to fix later if need be. As long as you can keep the LEDs below 70 centigrade not to much can go wrong.