How do you make the tour of holiday houses extra special for your Christmas-crazed son? Pull him in a little red wagon that's lit up with its own strand of 60 LED Christmas lights, like Rob Readings did. He powered it with an old motorcycle battery and a cheap power inverter. How about adding a sound system next year, Rob?
Posted by John Park |
Dec 14, 2008 05:00 PM
Holiday projects |
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Back in the days before LED lights and before you could buy AA battery powered lights or 12V inverters, I used to resolder miniature light strings to 12 volt. The mini bulbs in a 35 light string were 3 volts each, so I would solder them in many series of four within the long line of lights. Then the string could go on or in the car. I even made a short string of 12 bulbs in four series of 3 to run off a 9V battery, that my pup would wear when I took him out to go potty during the holidays when I lived downtown Chippewa Falls. Everybody loved the pup with the Christmas spirit.
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@Craig: Thanks for sharing that Craig. That is a good idea. I might try that with some broken half working strands I have laying around.
Have a Merry Christmas.
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I did the same thing, except I just used some store-bought battery powered LED lights. They run off of 2 AA batteries, last a long time, and are a heck of a lot safer than a lead-acid battery and an inverter!
If you don't want to use tape to attach the lights, you can try using these removable cords clips from 3M:
http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/Command/home/us_en/products/cord_mngmt/
If he add's a sound system, I would suggest a flash-based MP3 player. The lack of suspension on these kinds of wagons plays havoc with CD players and disk drives!
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