Our house is hard to find, our mailbox is across the street, our street is dimly lit if at all. Sounds like a job for the x-carve! After the snowplow took our our mailbox, I brought it in, sanded off the rust, primed and painted it. Including the flag. Then, I needed numbers. I could run to the hardware store… but the x-carve is just sitting there. I used .125" aluminum, backed by clear acrylic that I sanded with 400 grit and Inventables purple acrylic for the backing, with 1/2" Azek XLM sandwiched in between (with a pocket for the lights). The lights came from the checkout aisle - a little string of battery powered christmas lights. The solar panel (not pictured) came from a solar yard light in the bargain bin at the hardware store (included solar panel and lithium battery). The christmas lights draw 400 ma, the original yard light draws approximately the same. Should work. Will try to post pictures once the pain dries on the mail box.
Great idea. Already stole it!
Very cool! I love the industrial feel of the font choice and the aluminum with bolts.
I built a similar-in-concept welcome sign with my X-Carve last summer. It’s still going strong.
By the way, Harbor Fright sells solar-powered string lights for $10-12 which pretty much come all-inclusive for a project like this. The only thing I did (after chopping up the case and removing the plastic tube the lights come in) was to swap out the crappy battery for a higher-rated rechargable. If the sign is in bright sun all day, it will stay lit all night long.
Nice job! We have communal mailboxes in our neighborhood, so no need to do a mailbox like this, but I would love to adapt this to a house number sign for the house. It’s really hard for people to find our house, especially at night, because the numbers are in a bad spot and the lighting is horrible.
I would like to do a house number sign as well but we get absolutely no sunlight through the trees. Maybe an energy beam?
I luck out there…there’s only 2 trees on our street, probably little more than a dozen in our section of the neighborhood. No problem at all getting sunlight, and I never have to clean my gutters!
In situ photo. Tonight, two very important things happened.
- The sun charged the battery and the light came on when the sun went down.
- The wife and kids said, “Coooool…”
Nice work!
#2 is way more important…