Hive Towers

Michael Taylor from Hoffmantown Church in Albuquerque, NM brings us these cool light towers.

From Michael: For this design, we took inspiration from the Portman P2 Hexaline fixtures. I really like how they looked, but they were WAY too expensive for our budget… So we decided to build them instead, and we saved tens of thousands of dollars by building them ourselves. Here’s how we did it.

We 3D printed the main Honeycomb reflector frames out of Black ABS with an Ender 5 3D printer. Keeping the outside black, we then spray-painted the inside silver to reflect the light.

They were pretty flimsy, so we took 1/4 MDF panels and cut them into hexagons to fit inside. We then glued cheap Bubble Foil Insulation from Home Depot to the MDF, and trimmed it along the edge.

Taking 8 ft Fluorescent Tube Protectors from Home Depot, we cut them to size, and scuffed them up so that they were no longer clear, but had a “frosted” look – so that they would reflect the strips. We then used the adhesive baking to stick the strip inside the tube.

All wires poked out through a small hole in the MDF to the backside.

After building 5 hexagons, we bolted them to a 8′ piece of unistrut. A right angle steel plate was bolted to the bottom, and then welded to a steel plate we purchased from a local Steel Manufacturing company. This made the unistrut perpendicular to the floor. We repeated the process 9 times, until we had 9 poles.

Cinderblocks were painted black, and put on the plates as “sandbags” so that they wouldn’t fall over.

All wires went down to an Environmental Lights DMX Decoder Studio – 24 Channel, and were daisy-chained together via DMX cables.

Each pole had its own decoder, so that they could be moved as one piece.

Between the poles, we put some Tomshine 60w moving heads on the floor to shine up onto the wall.

These little guys come in handy for events, and they’re BRIGHT! They have their issues, but for $73/each you can’t beat them.

All of the lights are controlled from a Chamsys Magicq 2010 Pro.

Materials used:
Environmental Lights Current Control 5050 LED RGB Strips
Environmental Lights DMX Decoders Studio – 24 Channel
Ender 5 3D printer
Unistrut
1/4 MDF Sheets
8 ft Fluorescent Tube Protectors
Bubble Foil Insulation
Black spray paint
Silver spray paint
Cinderblocks
Steel plates