[Blue_adept]

Like many of you here i tend to over-engineer things. This is the first of several posts with DIY themes. Hope you enjoy.

I like to use galvanized flat stock from the HVAC section of my local big box hardware store. They come in various sizes and are a nice thickness to work with. You will need a few scraps of plywood/OSB/2x material as you bending form, a large enough piece of sheet steel to make you light traps, and a sharp pair of tin snips.

Here is the basic layout for a 6x8x2 light trap, but it can be scaled in any direction for a larger/smaller application.


Once you have cut this:



to look like this:



now you are ready to start bending. Score the bends with a utility knife, put you sheet stock between two pieces of board and bend towards you, using a hammer to finish the bend gives a nice smooth line
I prefer to start with the smallest pieces first and work in a linear direction:












Once you have all the bends made, you can drill 1/8 in holes and use rivets to pin it together. I attach the 2x2 squares around their respective sides first to create the basic box shape.



Then mark opposing sides to be cut. On one side cut the top right, on the other it will be the bottom left.






Take one of the offcuts i told you to save earlier and bend it along the line already marked on it.






You can now paint the inside of your box and the divider piece.



Once the paint has dried you can rivet the divider into the box with it aligned against one side and running parallel between your two cutouts:



apply some weatherstripping along the edges of the divider to keep any of that sneaky light out.

Now you can fold down the last piece and rivet in place. Apply enoough rivets to ensure there are no large gaps anywhere:



At this point i give the inside a little respray through the holes to make sure any scratches i made during assembly are covered. then i tape around all the seams, and there she be!.



These can be attached with screws/rivets/tape/whatever and flow a fair amount of air with no noise.

BlueAdept

[TheAfficianado]

Very nice tek, and much cheaper than darkroom vents at 30$ a pop for the vents. Several of these boxes of your design would fit out a large closet really well.
TheAfficianado

[Maj.PotHead]

very nice except alot of ppl arent fabricators of course i worked in steel shops for many yrs so tis nothing for me. but for those who cant Fab, a 4 inch 90 degree black ABS {pvc} elbow or few is perfect. had it mounted on bottom 1 side of cab pointed down ,no light came into cab had 1 on my C25 style cab worked great my closet i just suck air in through bottom of door 2 inch gap.

[Blue_adept]

it doesnt take a fabricator to make these, thats why i wrote the writeup the way i did. The price total of one of these is about $2 whereas a 4in abs elbow is around $4 here.

BlueAdept

[FrankRizzo]

I like your design but I have to agree with the Major. If you don't own a pair of tin snips that alone would make the cost of building this more than some pvc. If you have them thats another story, but I have found during the building of all my stuff the tools I've had to buy have cost me about the same as the materials, if not more. Now that I have them, I never need to get them again but it still is a cost that I have to factor in. Some people don't have the luxury of going out and buying the tools to build some of this stuff. Either way good work on the design.

FRizzo

[Maj.PotHead]

pls dont get me wrong this is very nice and clean just some ppl even with instructions couldnt figure it out maybe submit this to Pontiac for the linkorama, its full of very useful info link is in my sig. the linkorama is here at icmag so your not going to another site

yea Frank my tin snips alone cost me 25$ he he but should last me rest of my life n/p theres things all over my town i've either made or helped make when i worked in metal shops. i miss them days but do really enjoy my smell's taste's and such lol when the 500 pound hydrolic hammer was bangn WoW shake the whole foundation for the shop. shop was small 40 welders 10 polishers few painters few shear n break machine ppl could build anything in that shop.

[Pimpslapped]

Man do I know where you folks are coming from on having to buy the tools to do a job... slowly building up a collection of my own and snips aren't part of that setup...

But, on the same note you can manage something like this without using snips, though it would take more work and might not be as pretty. At a glance I'd say this would be fairly easy to finagle using a cheap hacksaw. It might not be as easy to do as snipping would be, but I'd say it could be managed. If you happen to have a dremmell or other such tool, those could probably be subbed in as well.

I like the setup Blue... I mocked up something like that out of cardboard, just never got past that stage with it.

[Maj.PotHead]

Originally Posted by Pimpslapped

Man do I know where you folks are coming from on having to buy the tools to do a job... slowly building up a collection of my own and snips aren't part of that setup...

But, on the same note you can manage something like this without using snips, though it would take more work and might not be as pretty. At a glance I'd say this would be fairly easy to finagle using a cheap hacksaw. It might not be as easy to do as snipping would be, but I'd say it could be managed. If you happen to have a dremmell or other such tool, those could probably be subbed in as well.

I like the setup Blue... I mocked up something like that out of cardboard, just never got past that stage with it.

dremmell

lol mine cost me 75$ and i use it to polish rocks, torquise opal jasper and such

honestly this is good enough for the icmag DYI linkorama because theres ppl out there who could build this in 15-20 min's max i gave good rep for the designe

[FrankRizzo]

I agree, it should get the link. You could also built this from wood if you wanted. The process would be a bit different but the design itself would be the same.

FRizzo

[StealthFarmer]

Nice info Blue_adept! Im gonna try making this with cardboard instead...