For my quotes project I created a lighting fixture to act as a search light on my watch tower. But while playing with the ideas I ran into some issues with brightness and focusing.

Here are the LEDs in the light. I felt like I needed two of them because one wasn’t bright enough with the lights in the lab on. I used a paper towel tube to help keep the beam of light contained and not spread out.

The problem with having two light sources is you get two defined beams of light with a bright spot in the middle. I was looking to create a more unified beam of light instead of two separate beams. I thought maybe a way to make them look like one beam was to make some sort reflector.

I put a piece of tin foil inside my paper towel tube hoping that it would create a more unified look but instead it reflected the lights everywhere. When I was putting the foil in the tube it got crinkled and because of that the light reflected everywhere and didn’t get contained in the tube. It also didn’t unify my beams of light.

I actually ended up kind of liking seeing the two beams of light and ditched the tin foil for a more clean look. If I were to do this again i would probably use four LEDs evenly spaced to minimize seeing the different beams. It would be more unified and be brighter.