Hello everyone,

I joined in early December, and have been spending a decent amount of time going through the boards. I ordered my parts immediately when I joined, but my progress has been slow. I hope to log some of my troubles and successes here, along with some pictures.

I'm hoping for a projection by mid-February, lets see if I can make my deadline. My fiance is interested in the projector as well, and she wants to work on it with me as often as we both have time. I'm not sure how this will affect my schedule, but it's fun to work on projects together. I don't know how much I'll work on it alone. Well, at least I can plan!

I bought the Kt001 Mega-Projector Kit $ 280.94
With Shipping $300.93 USD

This kit contains:
1022b 120V S400DD Ultimate Light Kit
1005 S15 Lens Kit
WK120V 120V Wiring Kit
WF12v Evercool PCAC Fan
WA120 AC Adaptor
UV1012 UV Filter 10" x 12

I read up and posted a couple questions about 15" LCD's and went ahead and made my purchase:
CMV CT-522A-Blue Blue 15" 16ms LCD Monitor 450 cd/m2 500:1 Built in Speakers 0.297mm Pixel Pitch - Retail ($169.99) + $10 shipping

Kit: $301
LCD: $180
Home Depot Receipts: $55 + $95 (hard to say exactly)
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Total so far = $631

The box will be made out of 3/4" MDF, the frames for the lenses and LCD will be made from 1/4" MDF.

So much to say...

Thanks to everyone on the forums, and wish me luck!

The kit contains these items: (dpst switch missing from picture)
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And here's the ballast diagram. Okay, I see the diagram, but which set of wires are which? My guess would be red/blue are input, and brown/blue are output to the mogul/lamp?
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I still need to test my ballast. When I got it in the mail I noticed some parts were rattling around inside. I still haven't gotten around to trying to wire power to it. Wiring is a weak spot for me.

The dpst (dual post single throw) switch and power dealio that wasn't pictured earlier. This is shown with the breaker (replaces the fuse in the wiring diagrams from the forum).
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So I believe I need to cut the contacts off from the hot and neutral. I'll want to solder onto what's left over there. Sure...

And the flipside of these: (switch is the only interesting one really..)
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Grabbed some 3/4" MDF from Home Depot and asked the person there to cut the dimensions I had written down for my box. Well hearing the guy say "it's hard to get these cuts completely right" 3 times in a row should've been a tip for me, but I wasn't listening.

Anyway, I got home and measured them to find out every peice of MDF was unusable as it was. So the fiance and I busted out the circular saw and made them as best we could.

Today was session 2, which included cutting the projector lens hole and the fan hole in the rear of the box.

We got the fan and the projection lens to fit, so we went ahead with constructing the box. We aligned everything up and clamped it, drilled the pilot holes, then screwed in the left and right sides to the bottom. After that we drilled the pilot holes for the front and back, took them off, applied liquid nails caulk to the sides of the front/back pieces and put them in place. We drilled the 1 1/4" screws into the front and back, and cleaned up the caulk (a little, heh). The box is sitting the garage, but here are a few boring pictures of it!

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We haven't decided about painting it yet (I would probably go with spraypaint, right?), but this would be the right time to do it. Any suggestions about spraypaints, or painting mdf?

Also -- we didn't put the top on to make sure everything was looking okay, but I'm not too worried about it. We're just being extra cautious, and don't want to screw anything up.

make sure to use primer, and sand edges smooth 1st, because sawdust will fill in the small voids in the mdf and make for a better painting of it.

Sounds good, thanks for the tip. Dull dry and clean before painting as they say .

The wires coming out of the left side where it's written input is the input (which seems to have brown and blue wires). Seems obvious but someone had to tell me. Furthermore, on my ballast, both sets of wires have the same colors.




I also had a rattling noise in mine, so I opened it and removed a small metal chunk. I supposed it could create a short and destroy it. I suggest you open it and check it out. Do this before connecting it because of high voltages than can stay in some of the part even after being disconnected.

I guess it should be obvious, but I wasn't sure what perspective the diagram was. Doh!

Hrmm, I was told to try it out since plastic screw tabs sometimes break off during shipping.

Thanks for the info Bine. Your plog is entertaining .

no focus box???

and homedepot cut my wood very nicely!

Yeah I don't really have a plan for the focusing mechanism. That's one part I definitely need to look around the forums for. I've seen the focus box, threaded pvc, shower drain, deoderant stick, but I'm not convinced of an approach yet.

Heh, I'm glad Home Depot worked for you.

I'm thinking of grabbing an attic fan thermostat, but I'd like a digital readout (thermometer/temp gauge) too. I looked at some thermostats in Home Depot, but I'm worried the wall mounted ones won't be usable. I'll poke around here for some info on that too, unless anyone has any comments?

Ummm, I don't want to be technical here, but doesn't opening it up void the warranty?

Probably. I'll just give it a try to see if it works. I think I read the ballasts are burned in for 100 hours each before they're shipped anyway. So I suppose there could be a stored charge in there, and it wouldn't be any safer to open it up now or after I fire it up.

Unless the charge dissipates over time, then maybe it is safer to check now.

Anyway, I'll give it a try once I get some time, energy and shake this cold. Flem is no good.

As you can see I'm going at a v e r y slowwwwww pace.

Yesterday I picked up some 6" bolts and some nuts to hold my adjustable frames. I also looked around the forums to see what my focus box options are. I'll probably be taking off the front panel, or at the very least cutting a bigger hole in it. I'll use one of these poorly cut peices of mdf from home depot to be my adjustable focus mechanism. I could cut a large rectangle in the front, cut some slots for bolts on the sides for the focus box and cut the projection lens holder on the new mdf peice. Looks like my explaning skills are about as good as my woodworking and wiring

Oh well, plan plan plan...

The fiance and I have made a little bit of progress. Wedding planning takes priority, but I'm trying to make projector progress when I can. Throwing out my back sure doesn't help things...

The 2 fresnel lens frames have been created and allow the lenses to slide in and out from the top. I decided against the holding piece on the top so I could easily remove the lenses for cleaning. I've wrapped them in saran wrap to protect them from finger oils, cat hairs, and sawdust. This was a great tip I picked up around here, and has helped me work with the fresnels without fear.

The lens frame that needs the lexan with it (rear fres) slides in with the lens and fits like a glove. It isn't that tight, which is good. As others have said I want to make sure it has some room to expand. I had to cut the lexan so I scored it with a box cutter/carpet knife about 10 times and then snapped it. It wasn't too difficult. I'd like to post some pictures of the frames soon.

The focus box (box sliding within another box) needs to be put together. We planned it out together, and the fiance is making it. Most of the peices are cut. We will need to cut into the front panel where the proj lens hole is. The sliding box will have inner dimensions of 7x7x2", and the box that will hold it inside the pj will be 8.5x8.5x2". I'm hoping this is enough focus travel.

I started some of the wiring, but only the easy stuff -- no soldering yet. This 12 gauge wire I have is pretty thick stuff. It will be difficult connecting/soldering this wire to the small ballast wires, and especially the ballast ground. I have terminal block clips (Y shaped crimpable connectors) that I wanted to simply screw onto the ballast, but naturally it's giving me crap. I guess I'll be soldering that too.

The lamp wires are pretty thick (and my other wire), but the ballast wires are not. Is the common practice for hooking these up solder them together, and cap them off? Or should I just try to twist them together and cap them off? Stripping the ballast wires was a pain as well. Is it 16 or 18 gauge?

It's been a while since I've done much soldering, but hey that's part of the fun . About half of my time working on this project is keeping the cat away from whatever I'm either working on or have just put down.

Good times so far.

Any tips or comments is always appreciated. Thanks.

So I did end up opening the eballast and sure enough a bunch of plastic peices and what looks like some dried hot-glue came falling out. Closed it up right away after that, I was pleased nothing vital fell out

Started doing some wiring, and lets just say this: don't ever ever ever ever use a very very old soldering iron. I hadn't soldered in a long while either and forgot how easy it's supposed to be. I struggled with that old iron for a couple hours til finally I opened up the new one I had bought. It was like working with butter, and the wires were the 2 peices of bread... meh!

Shots of the fresnel frames:
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Main box with focus box peices almost ready to assemble (and mr. I get into everything pictured too):
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slow 'n' steady...

I got lazy with posting on my plog. Well I'll try to play some catch up.

I got around to the light test:
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It worked! Although I didn't leave it on long enough for burn in. It wasn't very secure and I was still scared of the thing at that point.

New focus mechanism...box sliding in another box.

This didn't turn out like we hoped. Since we did all manual cuts (no table saw), it was a pretty bad hack job. After trying to get it to fit and resanding and shaving off more and more we were pretty sick of this whole focus box idea.

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Next time, PVC sounds like a good idea. I wonder if anyone has a really solid focus mechanism with PVC and a walkthrough. I don't recall any great ones. Anyone?

I got most of the wiring done, and started to mount the terminal blocks into the box.
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I started to tackle the lcd, which was pretty nerve-racking. I had a couple decent guides to follow since mine is a cmt cv-522a, but still there was a lack of detail that I was looking for in the walkthroughs. for instance, the cable that goes to the button controls from another control board just came out. I was surprised by this and hoped something hadn't torn or was loose. Well it was fine since one side is a cable that clips in and the other side just pushes in. This was news to me, and news at the time that I didn't think I wanted.

After some annoyingly close calls at breaking the lcd during the last step that says 'remove from metal case' I finally had it out. Then my plan for the lcd frame came together pretty nicely. The end result looks like this:
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Decided to mount the ballast outside of the box, on the back. This is so it lasts longer and also saved me quite a bit of room inside:

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I had to see if the LCD was still working. I attached everything, stood it up, and shined a light through the back....success!

It still looks okay:)

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Frames are going in next, then after that I get to put the bulb 7/8" too far back...oops wait for the screenshots:)

Found the master flow thermostat on the 18th visit to home depot (okay maybe not the 18th). I finally looked up the SKU someone else posted and called the store. They had like 18 in stock, yet no one could ever point me in the right direction...figures!

So I wired the thermostat in, got the frames setup, and tried to align the bulb to what I thought was the center.

Sorry, somewhat blurry picture:(

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When we first turned it on, the fan wasnt running, which meant there was a wiring problem. Everything else ran fine. Shut it down and found the loose wire. Started it up again and actually got a movie playing to see how it was. As you can see there is a darkness overall and especially in the upper right corner:
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I remeasured the bulb distance from the first lens and it was about 7/8" too far back....good job skel!

I moved it closer to where it should be, and tried to recenter where the arc was. Since the darkness was in the upper righthand corner I adjusted the bulb accordingly and gave it another try.

White image on my wall, with the cat eagerly waiting the reappearance of the mouse to chase

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It seemed a little dark in dark movies, but it was alot better than the initial test. Here's a shot of some Imperial walkers:

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I then received the pro reflector in the mail and wanted to install that.

I took a pc of 7" alum. flashing and cut a few holes in the sides. I used some plumbers tape and made a little ledge for the reflector to stand on. Then I made a pc that had clamping arms to wrap around the pc of flashing and to grip the reflector on both sides.

It worked so quickly and easily I was actually impressed with myself. Compared to the other struggles I ran into in this project the reflector was a breeze. I took some shots of it after it was installed, but maybe they can show what I did. Also - I added a few more pc's of plumbers tape (the metal strips with the varying sizes of holes in them) to hold it in its place.

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Another shot of the reflector setup:

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Post reflector the pictures still turn out pretty dark on dark movies, but they look pretty good. I need to pick some lighter movies to take some pictures of. Anyway,

Some pictures from Empire:

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I will try to get some better screens.

One thing I've been pretty worried about is the airflow / LCD temp. I need to try and seal some of the edges up of the frames, and the top where the cover comes on. My LCD has reached temperatures around 99 F, which is not good. My max operating temp is supposed to be 95. I haven't seen any problems in the LCD's performance, but I'd like to not shorten the life of the thing. I'm only using the one fan, I probably need to try and tweak the flow some more.

As a side note, the first time it was turned on was february 12th at 1:30am. So I beat the goal of mid-February. So basically I've had it done for 2 weeks and am now updating the plog....not too bad.

More tweaking is needed, and the cover still needs to be secured (with hinges and some kind of toolbox closing clamp).

.



skelman

You have done a great job cant wait to see some more pictures of the results.




Cheers




.

Thanks! I would say it went okay, not too many major bumps. And as they say, a DIY'rs job is never done.

So far...

Most satisfying parts:
1. Surprising my mother, revealing the super-secret project to her + my sister
2. First projection working
3. Adjustment of light which led to a brighter picture
4. First bulb test, and success

Most disappointing:
1. The focus box
2. Could be brighter (even with the pro reflector...maybe it's not close enough?:/)
3. Not completely focused throughout the entire screen
4. Frame hides part of the lcd/screen
5. Sitting the box flat leaves the lcd tipped to one side just enough to be annoying
6. Room is a bit small, and the stand where the projector is makes it hard for seating more than 4 people

I should play a brighter more colorful movie and get some pictures of that.

What's the brightness configuration software/program I've heard some other LL people talking about? I don't remember... Can anyone remind me please?