The Loft Creative

DIY Ring Light

Taken from a 500px tutorial 

Materials: 

- 14 gauge household wiring (we recommend over 15 feet) - 12 light sockets (we used fan lights with power chains) - 24″x24″ plywood. We used 1/2 inch - A light switch with a dimmer (make sure it can handle the wattage required for 12 light bulbs, and consider that the dimmer needs watts to run itself) - 12 light bulbs (we used regular 40 watt bulbs, but they get warm. We will eventually replace them with dimmable LED bulbs) - Power cord - A handful of wire connectors - Electrical tape - Electrical box

Tools: 

- Jigsaw - Drill - Sand paper - Wire cutters and strippers - Screwdriver - Screws that are shorter than the thickness of your plywood  - Pliers - Box cutter - Measuring tape - Pencil - String or extra piece of plywood for drawing a circle - Protractor, or 4 grown men capable of doing trigonometry and debating angles for an hour

INSTRUCTIONS: 

1) Measure the center of your plywood, and draw a dot. From the center, either attach a string or loosely drill in a piece of wood to create your outer and your inner circle for cutting. With ours, we placed our sockets directly on the wood and we decided that we needed at least 6 inches, so our outer ring was 12 inches and our inner ring was 6 inches from the center.  

2) While you still have your center point marked, and before you’ve done any cutting, take your protractor and mark out every 30 degrees. Then take a ruler and extend each line so that it reaches the outside of your circle. This is massively important to do because you will want all of these spaced evenly. We missed this step and it took a carpenter, a computer scientist, an engineer, and a guy with his bachelors of mathematics and his masters of economics nearly an hour to argue how it would be done perfectly without a protractor. In the end it worked out, but we would suggest avoiding that. Set your sockets down around the circle, centering them on your 12 marks, to make sure that they fit properly before cutting.

4) With your ring cut out, and your 12 lines all marked for the incoming bulbs, drill your holes in the center of each line. Make sure that you are using a drill bit that is large enough to accommodate your wires. 

5) Your ring is now prepped, and it’s onto the wires. Take your 14 gauge wire and give it a squeeze so that you can feel the two wires that are inside the casing. Take a knife and gently cut down the seam between the two wires, being careful not to cut them too. Pull off the casing completely to leave you with 15 feet worth of black and white wires. 

6) Cut your black and white wires into 15 inch sections (we used 12inch sections we found that to be too restricting because of the sockets that we were using). Using a wire stripper, bare roughly an inch on either side of each wire. 

7) Start with your first four wires (2 white and 2 black) and feed those through the first hole. Depending on your socket, you may have one gold contact and one silver contact or two of each. If you have two of each, wiring this will be much easier. We only had one of each, so we had the added task of having to twist our wires together before connecting them, which added so much time to our project. 

8) The 500px tutorial has the wiring polarity mixed up, but it doesn’t matter as much as you must stay consistent throughout the project. Black wires connect to gold contacts. White connect to silver. Do not mix those up. Remember it as white looks like silver, and they belong together. 

9) Connecting your wires. Take the two black wires that you have and curve them into little hooks at the end and loop them around the screws at the gold contact. Make sure that you loop them in a clockwise fashion so that when you tighten the screw it just gets tighter. If you have only one screw for the gold contact, twist your two black tips together, make the hook, and then tighten the screw. Do the same with the white and the silver contact. 

10) Once secure, push it down so that the socket is flush with the wood and screw the socket into the wood. Make sure that your screws aren’t too long or they will pop out the other side and prick your fingers. 

12) Attaching the dimmer and your electrical box. First screw in your box to the back of the ring light, making sure that your wires aren’t getting pinched or cut behind it. We punched out the side of our socket to fit the wires through. 

13) Take your power cord, and snip off the outlet side, exposing the wires. There should be a black and a green wire inside. Feed your power cable through the electrical box and then tie a lose knot in it. This will give it a little bit of resistance should you accidentally pull on the cord, and it will prevent your wired connections from taking any strain. Connect the green (ground) from your power cord and the black from your light socket to your dimmer. Connect the remaining white wire to the power cord. Use wire connectors and tape well. 

Now experiment with your lighting! 

Turn off some of the bulbs, move the lighting to the side, play with color temperature, dim the bulbs, move the light closer or farther from your subject, try some back lighting, or bounce the light off of something. There are no rules with this, so enjoy experimenting!