DIY LED Neon Sign with Acrylic Backer

We just made this live on air neon sign and we'll show you how we did it right now. What is up? Welcome back. Do you like to do it, build it, or make it? So do we. And we have a new video each week. This week we're making a neon sign. Kind of. Yeah, this one there's no cutting and no soldering. So we're going to show you a quick and easy way to make your own DIY neon sign. We originally wanted to try to do it with these rope lights like we've seen other people do on the YouTubes. But after we got the frame made, I felt like it was too much, too tight. Just would be a lot of soldering and stuff. Yeah, these are very thick and they're not super flexible. Yeah, not very pliable. So can't get them in these little spaces very easily. So, but it can be done. I've seen them do it. Have you done it? Have you made these with, have you made a neon sign with these rope lights? If so, let me know down below how hard was it? Yeah. Was it, was it actually easy in the end? I don't solder and we don't have a soldering iron, so we were going to try something else. So our next option we tried was L wire. Courtney suggested it to us. She says she uses this for cosplay and we thought, look how tiny and flexible this little wire is. I could tie that in a knot. Oh for sure. And so I decided to do a name sign with this. We used some acrylic. First time we've really done any major projects with acrylic. We cut out a channel. Yes, we put this L wire in this channel, but there wasn't enough light. Yeah, it's just, it was too dim. We couldn't see anything. It did not look like a neon sign. Definitely didn't look like anything with the lights on. With the lights on, right. I was gonna say with the lights off, it was bright and that was great, but its intended purpose isn't with the lights off all of the time. You're gonna see it all the time. So these didn't work. We decided to try to make fake neon using layered acrylic and having it backlit. Yeah, we're gonna use these LED tape lights. We got these at Lowe's. They were the cheapest version for 20 bucks. You find them in the under cabinet section. Yeah, that took a minute, but I found them. So here's how we did it. Step one, we're gonna make our design. I'm gonna show you a quick tip in Adobe Illustrator, how we made our font backlit. Kim already gave me the design. I just have to shrink the fonts and make it so that it'll be backlit. So I have them grouped. I'm gonna select both layers. I'm gonna duplicate selection. I'll hide this top layer. I'm gonna select this first one and we're gonna start giving it a stroke until it looks like it's shrinking. We'll use black. Let's just start with 10 points. Let's keep going. I'm gonna say like 15 points. Let's see. Zoom in. 14 points. 14 points looks good. All right, so I'm gonna select these. I'm gonna go to object, path, outline stroke. Now you see each one of these should have two layers. So I'm gonna select this. I'm gonna ungroup it. I'm gonna select both of these pieces and then I'm gonna come over here to minus front. Bam! Now I got a little sliver. I'm gonna do that to everything. Ungroup. Select them all again. Ungroup. Then I'll select the V. Minus front. I'll select the I. Minus front. Select the L. Minus front. Now I got a little sliver back here. I'm just gonna do the same thing for the on-air font and then I'll add some tabs so that they don't fall out and that they'll actually look like neon with the little break pieces. Select all these pieces in the background. We'll minus. Step two. Test cuts. I'm gonna use some cardboard to make our first test cut because acrylic is expensive. Yes it is. This looks like MDF but it's a perfect sheet of cardboard to go right in the Glowforge. And as you know, Glowforge has a cardboard setting and it cuts beautifully. Cuts and scores beautifully. Step three. Let's take it to production. We got our test cut all done on the cardboard and it looks great. I think it's gonna work. We're gonna go over to Glowforge and cut out all of our acrylic. Fingers crossed. In the Glowforge app there's a setting for each color of acrylic. I'm going to start with the blue medium. Now I'm just going to select the pink medium to do my pink. Finally I'm going to use black acrylic to cut out the black acrylic. Again medium. Finally I'm going to use a thick draft board setting to cut out all of the MDF pieces. Step four. Time to assemble. For the acrylic pieces we're going to use our Starbond thick glue and our pro tips that come in each package of glue. This is so that we can have a really fine line of glue to go under those letters and make sure it doesn't bleed out from underneath and leave a shadow. But you got to work quick. This Starbond glues this acrylic together in seconds. Like fast. Then we're going to use some wood glue to glue down all of our MDF pieces. We use the wood glue to give us a little more working time and we're gonna encase the outer portion with some blue tape to make sure those rings do not shift as they dry. I need those to stay in line. We don't want it to look wonky. Yeah we don't need a wonky frame. Next we're going to add a led tape to the inside of our circle frame. We're going to put it along the inside wall and across the base to make sure each of those letters have light shining behind them. Like I said these were the cheapest option which I guess is why this little section keeps cutting out. Step five and now we add the accents. Now that's really just turning the light off. This is so you can really see that neon in quotes pop. Look at us live on air. All right what'd you think? I think it turned out great for my first attempt at neon. I'd still like to try those rope lights with all the soldering and everything but I feel like I need a bigger piece of acrylic so that it doesn't have to bend so tightly and I'm still scared of the soldering. Have you made that neon light with the with all the soldering and making it look cool and real? Was it as hard as it looks? Was soldering way easier than I think? I don't know. Still a little scared of it. And this was our first attempt using a real project with acrylic. No wonder people love working with acrylic. It was so easy. It cut beautifully. Like first try it cut no problem. Fell right out. No burn marks. No warping. It yes it was great. It was easy. I can't wait to do more with acrylic. It's expensive but man does it look good. Big thanks to all of our patrons. We love you guys. I'll even put this file out there if you want your own on air sign. I put all my files up for the patrons. Yeah it was pretty pretty easy to make. Yeah it was nice and easy. All right well you know I am about out of time. I have to go make another sign so we will see you next week where we'll do build it and make it again. Oh don't forget to catch us on Tuesdays where we always have Test Cut Tuesday. It's a new file. And if you like this video hit that like button. Remember to subscribe and tick that bell for our new videos each week. Oh can I balance it with the cord on here? Is the cord gonna throw me off? Probably. It does throw you off. It does throw me off.