Clear plastic rods (light guide)

[Andrew Gabriel]

I construct various bespoke electronic items from time to time. Something I could use but have never seen in any of my suppliers catalogues is a light guide to effectively extend an LED from a circuit board to a front panel, spaced anything from 10mm to 50mm away. Plain clear plastic rods of 3 to 5mm diameter would do. (A bonus would be if they could be bent by gentle heating.)

Ones which were designed to be panel mounted at one end and cut to length at the other end would also be of interest, but I've never seen anything like this. Has anyone else?

[Frank Erskine]

RS do clear plastic rod from 6mm diameter.

[Cicero]

================================== You could try clear plastic knitting needles. They're readily available in a variety of sizes and should be cheap enough to experiment with. You might be able to bend by heating in a pressure cooker as we did with pipe stems.

Cic.

[geoff]

In message , Andrew Gabriel writes

Is this for a specific requirement ?

i.e. do you have precise dimensions?

some CH pcbs use them, else I could possibly turn something on the lathe

[Arfa Daily]

Farnell in Leeds carry an extensive range of light guides, pipes, splitters etc

see

to extend LEDs to front panels are already made and stocked, without you having to mess about bending up your own.

Arfa

[Lobster]

I might have seen something like this in B&Q, but might be dreaming. They certainly do various sizes in white plastic.

David

[nightjar]

Perspex was the traditional material for light guides before fibre optics. It has a high level of internal reflection, so, unless you make the bends too sharp, you get very little loss even in quite long runs. However, that also means that the light is very directional when it emerges, so you need to dome and roughen the end if you want anything but the narrowest viewing angle. Perspex rod should be fairly easy to get hold of and it does bend with gentle heat.

Colin Bignell

[Ian Stirling]

A pack of 100 that may suit - 7 quid delivered.

the look, these are simply a fibre bundle with a bit of heatshrink to connect them to a LED.

is a source of the raw material.

[Keith]

Are there any 'shows', sunday markets, car boot sales, near you, i.e stalls selling overpriced tat, usually including fibre-optic lamps for a pound or two. A couple of the fibres and a touch of superglue to bundle them together is all you need.

[Ian Stirling]

But at that price - 7 quid for a hundred precut-delivered free, ...

Dealextreme has way too much stuff though.

[PCPaul]

boxes. Ordered what seemed like a huge number of things and it only came to about £40...