Well after about a year of gathering parts (and moving to a new home) I finally got a chance to build my projector, took lots of pics so without further delay here it is!!

Click to view attachmentScrapped my first box, I had made it out of MDF but I didn't like the weight or frequent splitting so I switched to china birch.

Found this shower drain at lowes, I tried another drain before this one and it didn't turn as easy as this one.Click to view attachmentClick to view attachment
note the assembly laying on top of the drain, this was a no caulk drain so it had a compression ring inside which threaded out Whooo Hoooo !

As part of my basic box design (figured I would start simple then work up to a more complex design later after I gained better knowledge of design) I started out with a fixed position for my triplet
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then I decided that it might be more beneficial if I made my triplet "moveable" allowing me to position it during operation.
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Inside of a basic box, I'm venting on the side rather than on the top. The extra blocking added to the left side of the image was to support the electronics of the first panel I stripped (got it off ebay and it ended up being shot, had an ffc which I would have had to bend to get it away from the panel )
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This is my light assembly, don't know if the design has been done before but i'd like to think I came up with it!~
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note the truss head screw, the block that the mogul base is attached to slides back and forth on it and the bottom wood rail to allow a bit of bulb adjustment.

Bulb assembly installed.
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This is the model of the monitor I used, got it from walmart for $160.00
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this baby was super easy to strip with no ffc's! all cabling was nice and long and it auto switches on at power up (debating whether or not to place the controls outside or just leave them in the box)

Here's the fan I chose seems to be keeping things cool
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I came up with this air seal i'm going to use to make things air tight, great heat characteristics and it's silicone!
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got it at lowes. rated to 400F

the wiring I chose was purchased at lowes (rated for internal use in appliances 105 C.

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A little bit of wiring
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My circuit board layout, note the nice long ribbon cable! it's actually folded over. this panel was very nice as far as lengths of wire.
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added aluminum flashing to the light section.
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used tacks to secure it. didn't figure glues would hold up to the heat and by tacking it created a loose contact with the wood surface to give a little air barrier.
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this was my first test using a transparency.
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this was my first test with the lcd in place

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all in all the picture is very watchable but I found using the specs in the LL manual didn't get me even a decent picture like what every one else has been showing (your size may vary one size fits none) working on a dim out of focus corner issue right now and i'll be stripping the ag to try and improve my brightness and clarity, still it's a great project!

I found the same thing. Do you have a reflector for your bulb? I didn't see one in your pics. That will make a difference. The measurements in the guide are a starting point. I found out I had to adjust the distance between the bulb and first fresnel to more evenly illuminate the LCD, and change the spacing between the second fresnel and the triplet to get more of the light into the triplet. Of course, going too far one way or the other and you'll have a different set of problems. Experiment.

I do have a reflector installed, I found a pretty spherical bowl at target and cut the inner piece out (it was double walled). I tore down my unit last night and found my collimating lense wasn't exactly flat so I rebuilt the frame using shoe molding which i'm thinking the radius of the wood will move more of the frame outside of the light path. I rabbeted a small groove in the edge to allow the fresnel to sit flush with the wood then sandwiched it with the lexan (read in another post that a fella was doing this and the heat wasn't affecting his lense).

I just reinstalled my rear fresnel with the new mod and it improved my results i'll be posting some pics of my fix, also I had used a rather deep shower drain fixture and had left the extra threads on for longer focus movement but I think doing this blocked some of my light so I cut it nearly flush with the rear of the triplet.

also I tilted the rear fresnel slightly backward which brightend up my top corners.

I'm currently removing my AG which should bump up my brightness but it's already looking much better!

some shots of my light improvement, waaaay better than before, camera shows corners slightly dimmed but not so noticable in real life.
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I'm projecting onto a wall painted with Behr Silver Screen, makes a nice image but I may switch to blackout.

here's a shot of my completed light box I did have a reflector installed from the start. I tried taking it out and putting it in while the unit was runnig but I didn't see a noticable difference.

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Light er up!


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For grins I took a shot with the flash, the light from my projector out powered the flash! LOL

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Got my AG off using the water/rag method left it on about 2hrs peeled off kinda easy, there was a little bit of firm pulling/ nail biting (wrecked one panel already by removing the polarizer with it, the panel didn't work right anyway).

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Here was one of my dim corner fixes.

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By using shoe molding it got alot of the frame structure out of the light path

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Hard to show what I was describing in my post about using molding so I did a quick drawing of my set up which seemed to help alot of my dim corner issues!

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Are you going to do any painting on the inside?

I did paint the inside of the front section flat black, I'm leaving the rear section unpainted.

I'm doing a ceiling mount arrangement so here's my hanging bracket I welded up. It allows some up and down movement as well as forward and backward to help with focusing

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Well.... one thing to consider when designing your box is that if you are going to hang it take into consideration your weight distribution, note the hole to the right of the pencil line... that was where I was initally going to support my box but after adding in the ballast and what not it made my unit extemely tail heavy. I used a dowel and set the unit on it and moved it back and forth until it somewhat balanced. my new hanger position was off by 3"


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Decided to rework my reflector, picked up a nice bowl from target that is pretty spherical on the inside.

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what are you doing to the reflector?

I see! I thought one was supposed to paint the portion of the box that contained the light engine to keep stray light from interfering. Is that the section you refer to? I don't guess it would matter with a reflector anyway!

i'm using a bimetal hole saw to cut out the sides so that the bulb center can rest halfway.

I don't seem to be having any problems without it being painted ( then again I wouldn't know unless I painted it!) but i'm not seeing any weird hot spotting so don't fix it if it ain't broken

Went ahead and repainted my screen wall changing it from a grey/pearl mix to an eggshell ultra white that I got from Lowes. made a big difference in the wall texture that was showing in the projection. Now you don't notice it at all and my hotspotting is gone!

Picked me up an xp media center wireless keyboard off ebay for 50 bucks! what a deal plan on using a pc for my projector cause I want to surf on it as well as play some emulators GO OLD SCHOOL!!!

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Got my pj hung temporarily so I could target what I needed to build as an entertainment center.

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ceiling isn't very high so I'm having to rethink my keystone setup

Cabinets partially built today!

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Looking good!

Looks like you have a pretty big angle there. What is your keystone setup?

I'm using the gravity arrangement it's well past 15 degrees so I was having focus issues on part of the screen so I popped it open real quick and drove a screw into the case to prevent the front fresnel from swinging too far forward, fixed the focus but now I have a slightly trapizoid screen