Making LED Neon Signs with Steveston Creative

Steveston Creative

This video was made in partnership with Bits & Bits.

Introduction:

Hi, everyone! My name is Emmett Gallagher from Steveston Creative and I am one of the instructors here at The Maker Collab University. 

Watch The Video Here!

If you’re not familiar with Steveston Creative, we are a bespoke lighting studio based on Vancouver Island on Canada’s west coast. We specialize in custom LED Neon art and signage for weddings, events, businesses, and interiors. We are a husband and wife owned business and we have been creating LED Neon signs since 2019,  so we know a thing or two about them! My background before starting Steveston Creative was in the architecture and construction world, and my wife Hannah has an MFA in theater design (set, lighting and costumes). If you would like to see some examples of our work, you can follow us over on Instagram @stevestoncreative.

Today, I’m going to give you a short intro to how we make our LED Neon signs. This isn’t going to be a full in-depth tutorial because that would need to be a long format video. Instead, I will briefly show you the materials and tools we use, how we design our products, and how we fabricate them with the help of our CNC router. Since this video is sponsored by Bits and Bits company, I will go into a little more detail about what CNC bits work best for making our signs.

What is LED Neon, or LED Neon “Flex”

When people hear the word “Neon” they typically think of the more traditional style of neon lighting, which is thin, rigid, glass tubes filled with inert gases. The gases are then electrified at high voltage to give off various colours depending which gas is used; the kind of thing you would see in Las Vegas or New York.

LED Neon is more of a new, modern alternative to this old- fashioned style of lighting. The term “neon” in LED Neon is used purely as a descriptor, since it does not actually include any neon gas. Instead, LED Neon is comprised of a LED light strip that is fully enclosed in a coloured jacket (typically silicone or PVC). With an LED Neon sign, the various colours are achieved by either changing the colours of the LED strips inside, or the jacket colour on the outside, or both. The purpose of the silicone jacket is to evenly diffuse the light coming from each individual LED (light emitting diode). That is how we achieve that neon-like glow without actually using any neon gas. 

Why choose LED Neon Vs traditional glass neon?

It is important to note that LED Neon and traditional glass neon are two completely different mediums, so like anything, each will have their pros and cons.

The main benefits of LED Neon are lower cost, low power consumption, safe to touch, durable, silent, long-lasting, and does not need to be installed/maintained by a professional. 

The main reason people might choose traditional glass neon over LED Neon is that glass neon does have a very specific 360 degree glow that can’t really be replicated by LED Neon. The main reasons people might not choose glass neon is high cost, breakable, high voltage power required, requires more maintenance, and typically requires a professional installer.

The Materials and Tools we use:

LED Neon signs are made up of five main components; a rigid backer (typically acrylic) to hold the flexible LED Neon in place, the LED Neon strips, glue, wiring, and a power supply. The size and output of the power supply needed will depend on how much LED Neon you are using.

For hand tools, we primarily need cutting tools, soldering tools, and clamps to hold the LED Neon in place while it glues. For power tools, we use a circular saw, and a table saw to break down our sheet goods and a CNC router to cut out the backers for our signs. If you own a CO2 laser, that is also a fantastic tool that is well suited for making LED Neon signs.

The software we use:

Many of the signs we make are either text-based, or a logo from a client. We will typically design our projects using Adobe Illustrator. The reason for this is Illustrator deals very well with vectors, which makes it very simple to then bring the design into our CNC software so it can be cut out on our CNC. The LED Neon we use is typically either 6mm wide or 8mm wide, so when designing a project, we set our line thickness to one of those to trace the location of where we would like the LED Neon to be located on the sign. Once we have the design complete, we bring it into either Easel or Autodesk Fusion 360 so we can prepare the toolpaths for the sign backer to be cut out on our CNC.

Using the CNC to cut out our backers

The most common material we use for our sign backers is 3/16" thick, clear, cast acrylic. The material is rigid, lightweight, machines well, is relatively inexpensive, and since it is clear, it blends into the background and lets the LED Neon be the star of the show. If you have never CNC machined acrylic, you should always use cast acrylic rather than extruded acrylic. Extruded acrylic is much more likely to get stuck in your endmill and to your work piece. For workholding, we prefer to attach the acrylic to the wasteboard using double-sided tape. We find this is the fastest, and cleanest way to do it. The other option would be a vacuum table (which we don’t have, yet) or using clamps to hold the material down with tabs to keep everything attached while it’s cutting. We don’t like cleaning up tabs on acrylic, which is why we prefer the double-sided tape method.

Which bits to use for cutting, etching, and engraving acrylic.

To make our LED Neon signs, we have two main operations on our CNC. First we will either etch or engrave the location of where the LED Neon will go onto the front face of our acrylic. Our preferred tool to  do this is by using this spring-loaded diamond drag bit from Bits and Bits company. The reason we like this tool is that it is super precise, the spindle doesn’t need to be turned on (so it’s nice and quiet), and the spring-loaded feature means we’re not going to damage any tools or material in the process. All we do to use the diamond drag-bit is create a thin single vector around the outside of where our LED Neon will go. We then bring the tip of the drag bit down to the top face of the acrylic. In our software, we set the depth of cut to be 1/4” and to engrave in a single pass with no tabs. We set our tool diameter to be very small, like .005”, just to capture the very tip of the drag bit. A critical part of using a diamond drag bit is to make sure your spindle (or router) is turned OFF! As the name suggests, the CNC will simply drag the tip along the surface of the material, so the spindle does not need to be turned on for this operation.

Sometimes, we prefer to engrave a channel into the face of the acrylic to mark the location of the LED Neon. We usually only do this if the design has lots of tight details that would benefit from the LED Neon being placed in a channel. 

When machining acrylic (and most kinds of plastics), one of the main concerns is heat. If you are going too fast, too deep, spinning too slow, or you are using the wrong kind of endmill, the plastic will overheat and either stick to your endmill, your material, or both. This is why chip load, and the correct feeds and speeds are so critical when it comes to machining plastics. 

You want your endmill to produce the optimum size of chip to get heat away from the endmill as fast as possible. Enter the single “O” flute upcut bit from Bits and Bits! We have been using these “O” flute endmills from Bits and Bits since we started Steveston Creative back in 2019 and they are still going strong and leaving a perfect finish every time. Thanks to the complex geometry of these bits, they are incredibly effective at cutting off and evacuating plastic chips away from endmill to keep them cool. The large single flute allows for large plastic chips to be cut off at each revolution, and the steep upcut angle of the flute means the chips are evacuated up and away from the endmill at high speeds; thus getting the heat out of there as fast as possible! 

From our experience, we have found that a higher spindle RPM and slower feed rate with conservative depth of cut works best for a clean finish. As an example, we typically run our “O” flute endmills at 18,000 RPM (around 3 on the Makita router), with 80-100 IPM and a depth of cut equal to 50% of the tool diameter. So for a 1/8” diameter endmill, the depth of cut per pass would be 1/16”, and for a 1/4” diameter endmill, we would do a 1/8” depth of cut per pass. Where possible, we like to use the 1⁄4'' diameter “O” flute because it has a larger flute and we find it produces a cleaner cut overall. To achieve the best finish possible on the edge of your acrylic, we recommend leaving a couple thousands of an inch of stock on your part when doing the multiple depths, and then do one final finishing pass at full depth to remove that remaining stock. This will remove any machining lines from the previous operations.

After the acrylic comes off the CNC:

Once you have taken the piece off the CNC, you will notice that although the edge finish is nice and smooth, it is not clear. Cutting acrylic on a CNC typically leaves more of a frosted finish on the edge. To make this edge clear, we use a MAP gas torch to “flame-polish” the edge of the acrylic. The torch essentially melts the edge of the acrylic which returns it to that nice clear finish. Make sure to take any protective paper off the acrylic as it will burn the paper. Also, make sure to keep the torch moving and not overheat or melt the acrylic; if you hold it on one spot for too long it will catch on fire! There are also special diamond polishing tools you can get for the CNC to polish the edges right on the CNC, but they are super expensive and are more geared towards larger more industrial machines; we have never used a diamond polishing tool.

Ready for LED Neon installation:

Now that the backer is ready, we can start cutting the LED Neon into its various lengths to be installed onto the backer. We typically rough cut each length with a little excess and then as we work our way through the sign, we will cut the LED Neon down to its exact size for each letter. This is by far, the most time consuming aspect of our products. Depending on the complexity of the sign, it could take multiple hours to multiple days to completely fabricate a LED Neon sign.

Once the LED Neon is all cut down to size, we then come along with our soldering iron and wiring and begin connecting all of the pieces together. The key to making a clean looking LED Neon sign is to conceal as much of the wiring as possible and make sure that the cuts for each piece of LED Neon are nicely joined together. This can take quite a bit of practice to perfect (we’ve been doing it for 5 years and are still learning) but you will improve with each sign you make!

Once the LED Neon has been fully cut to size and soldered together, we then glue the LED Neon to the face of the back with a special silicone glue. Once all of the pieces are glued in place, we then attach a power cord and a correctly sized power-supply to the end of the sign so it can be plugged into the wall. All of our signs also come with a remote-controlled dimmer, wall mounting hardware, and a 3 year warranty.

Conclusion

Thank you for taking the time to follow along with this short introduction into how we design and fabricate our LED Neon signs.

If you are interested in going a little deeper, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel (Steveston Creative). Over there we will be doing more tutorial style videos on how we make our signs. You can also check out the handy online-customiser on our website (stevestoncreative.com) where you can design your very own LED Neon sign in a few minutes! We also sell all of the materials you need to make a custom LED Neon sign of your own if you feel like making one for yourself, or for someone else!

Thank you for The Maker Collab University for asking me to be one of their instructors. Thank you also to Bits and Bits for sponsoring this video and always being a reliable source for high quality tools for CNC machining. If you are interested in trying out some tools from Bits and Bits, you can use The Maker Collab University discount code TMCU at bitsbits.com for 10% off your order!

I’m Emmett Gallagher from Steveston Creative; keep on making!