Making a (fake) Neon Sign for my (very real) YouTube Channel Name Change!

There’s never a good time to change a channel name, so why not now? I’ll be transitioning the channel from the unpronounceable “Thomas Sanladerer” to the easy-to-remember “Made with Layers” name, and to celebrate the start of the journey, we’re making an incredibly believable fake neon sign (with lots of trickery to make it look good)!

I’m kind of nervous about this one because these are exciting times. First of all, we just crossed 450,000 subscribers, which is amazing. I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around that sheer number, so thank you to everyone watching, subscribing, and supporting the channel. I have to admit, I never planned this channel to be this big. Second, you’ve probably noticed a new name right under this video, and we’re also getting a new logo.

This channel is getting rebranded. I don’t know if rebranding is fair, because right now, it is just branding. There’s never been any branding. I’ve had the situation in Chicago where I was asked, because I was running around with a camera, like “Hey, are you a YouTuber? What’s your channel name?” And I was like, “Well, I’m gonna have to spell that out for you.”


After three years in the making,

this channel is now called

“Made with Layers”.


Here is why. When I started this channel, the entire reason for making a YouTube presence, creating something in the first place, was that I saw the need for information. I was part of the Google+ group back then, where people were asking questions and I saw the same stuff come up over and over again. And it was like, okay, the most efficient way to help everyone is to spend a day or two on creating a video, make it compact, make it understandable, and that was the start of this YouTube channel.

From there, it grew. The content basically got a mind on its own, like I saw “Hey, this thing is interesting, I’m going to make a video about that, I’m going to make a video about this.” The good thing is 3D printing has changed since then, so 3D printing is not this “Hey, I’m going to need help with this one configuration option Marlin anymore“, thankfully. That’s been fun and all, but I’m really happy that we’re now at a place where you can just buy a machine and it’s going to be good. I love that this is the new reality, that printers out of the box simply are a tool that you can use.

The other thing is if you do need that in-depth information, there are so many channels and blogs that often do a better job than me at explaining those in-depth topics. And looking at my videos from the last couple of years, there are definitely some in there that I felt like I had to do and not because I wanted to do them, and you can tell in the performance, that those didn’t do so well. On the other hand, the videos that did well were just often stuff that I was enthusiastic about, that I cared about and wanted to learn more about, and you seemed to enjoy that as well. So I’m going to do more of that. Which brings us to the big elephant in the room. The channel will be named “Made With Layers”. I’m taking my name out of this, honestly, “Made With Layers” is just so much easier to tell someone “Hey, that’s what my channel is” versus “Thomas Sanladerer”.

This channel has had some graphical changes from the weird western start which was just messing around with Premiere Pro, not knowing what I was doing, then the white and blue, and then I got into the diamond pattern, which was good, and that I’m still keeping.

I think with the new design, I’m staying recognizable. There might still be some tweaks to it, but what I wanted to do as the first project was a physical neon light logo, and I’m gonna show you how I made it.


There are two elements to making this neon-style sign, the first one is what they use to make a glow. Now, of course, I could get a neon sign made, but I wanted to do it myself, so the option is using this LED neon strip. It is basically a 5mm 12V LED strip inside of a light guide, and that makes it really easy to use. It doesn’t need any special power supplies, and to give it shape, all you need to do is route a channel of the correct size and push it into that channel.

It only gives you a light output towards the front, and not really onto your backsplash to give it that glow. To fix that, we’re going to airbrush that glow onto the sign to make it look like it’s glowing more than it is.

There’s one obvious tool for this to cut out the text and the framing, and that is the Shaper Origin. It is a handheld CNC, there’s a router in here with a screen and a camera system. You load your designs and it will guide you along your track and autocorrect for any small mistakes you make.

The Shaper uses a tracker tape to orient itself on the workpiece. The camera in the back picks up those patterns and also how your workpiece looks.

We’ve now got a scan of our workspace, a virtual representation of what our workpiece looks like. I could start drawing onto this virtual workspace and it would start routing that out, but because we want to import a design, I’m going to create a grid first.

Next, I import my vector, scale it to the correct size, and rotate it. The anchor is going to be our bottom right corner so that we can align it with the bottom edge, and now I can just move this down to the edge of our workpiece and pluck it down.

The logo is placed on our workpiece and we’re ready to cut. I can move over to one of our toolpaths, and tell it “Okay, I want to cut this one on the line and not just as a guideline” and there is our cut preview. We can start plunging into the material and making these cuts.

We did cut through the shaper tape, it is intended for that. These little dominoes, this is what the camera inside the Shaper Origin sees to keep its position, but since we do have quite a few more than we need, we can cut through a couple and the machine is still going to know where it is.

So that are all the tracks for the LED neon cutout, and it does fit in pretty well. It is rather loose, which is intentional because it gives us some wiggle room to stretch and pull this LED neon tape. There are still a couple of spots where I’m not going to be able to make it work with the 3-centimeter roughly cutting pitch, so I’ll have to figure something out there.

These letters were great to cut, but the long straight sections were a bit tricky because we’re not just cutting MDF, we are cutting real beach hardwood, and depending on how the wood fibers are oriented and because this is not a smooth MDF material, the feel of how you drag the Shaper Origin along can vary quite a bit. These did have a couple of bumps left and right, so I just took a second pass and routed through it again with less force because it was already routed out. Now the neon tape lays in pretty nicely.

What’s left to do now is to cut this to length and sand off the coating so that we can apply our own paint job to this. For that, the shaper tape needs to come off and the belt sander needs to come out.

That is sufficiently smooth and I’ll add a chamfer to the top with a traditional router and a chamfering follower bit. By the way, if you don’t have a decent shop vac with an auto mode and pass-through, get one of these! They are so worth it and not that expensive.


Let’s get to painting.

I’ll be doing two layers of paint on here. The first one with a cheap supermarket grade 2-in-1 primer paint combo, then I’m going to give it a quick sand and then add the final finish with the color that I got mixed up.

The color that I got mixed is RAL 5022-night blue and maybe just a tad bit too light, especially once I add the airbrushing to it, I would like this to be a bit darker. Thankfully, I still do have the graphite from the resin experiment, so I’m going to try and mix up a custom shade of this. I’m going to write down exactly how much I add in, so if I ever have to, I can reproduce it.

Two coats later and we’re done. The color is pretty interesting. If you look at this, it almost has a metallic sheen to it. That is the graphite, and once this dries, it’s going to be pretty nice and even and the texture is really smooth and even.

That was the easy part of getting the base coat down, and now it’s time to move on to getting the glow airbrushed on. For that, I’m going to use the same sprayer I’ve used for the base coat. You have control of how wide your spray is going to be, whether it’s just going to be a spot or that wide track. This is a single-action airbrush, so first you get air and then you get the nozzle that opens up, and you can limit how far you can open up with that limiter. I’m going to set that to a minimum, to a very pointy, round track. I’ll be using water-based paint, this time colored in this light blue petrol and I’ll be mixing in some white and thinning it down with some water.

I almost had a bit of a rough start there. It looked like on the first edge I was getting a really blotchy output from the spray gun, but many passes later, this turned out pretty much exactly as I’d hoped for. This is going to look amazing with the LED strips in there.


With the painting done, what’s left to do is to add the actual LED neon. This is the part that will be a bit tricky and fiddly and tedious maybe? I just saw Norm from Tested do a similar project at a bit smaller scale, a few simpler signs with the exact same stuff, and he was running into many of the same problems, like how do you solder to the ends, the fact that you can only cut it every 3cm, and I think I’ve got some pretty good solutions for that. So first of all, for doing these outside 90-degree corners, I cut away just a bit of the LED neon and now I can fold it into a sharp 90-degree corner.

Some of these layers are actually a pretty weird length where I can’t quite cut a full extra segment in there, so I’d have to cut it really short and that would leave a gap., I’m going to have to figure out something there as well. I’m thinking about replacing some of the LEDs in each segment, it’s 3 LEDs per 3cm segment with a resistor and shortening it that way.

I’m almost done with the inlay with the lettering on the inside here, and this has been quite the finicky job, mostly because you can cut this LED strip only at set intervals, and those intervals are spaced out to roughly 3cm, a bit over an inch. If you have a look at the S, that interval is just no shy of filling this up, there is a visible gap, which I don’t think is going to matter much, but it is a bit short, whereas, on the R, we are actually jamming it so tight that I was afraid of ripping the wires off or the cables off at the end that I soldered on. The E worked out perfectly!

But with the T, there was actually no way of having the center line from these 3cm long bits. So what I ended up doing with the piece for the T is actually pulling out the LED strip that is embedded in this PVC wrapper and cutting off one of the LEDs. This is a piece that I can use by itself with an additional resistor and hook it up to 12V.

Now, there wasn’t much left to do. I added the dot on the i and glued up some of the gaps with hot glue to make it look a bit more seamless. Then add some French cleats to the wall and to the back of the sign and hang it.

I think this turned out really nicely. The glow works really well, you can’t even tell that it’s sprayed-on airbrushed glow, but it really does help with it looking organic like real neon. It’s not perfect, but for what this is supposed to be, a prop background that’s visible in some shots in the studio, this is perfect. Even to the naked eye, it looks really good. So I’m really happy with how this turned out.


Now I´m going to slowly change the channel to all the new names and all the new graphics. You’ve seen most of them already, but I’ll keep tweaking them here and there.

Follow me on:

X (formerly Twitter): @MadewithLayers (the @toms3dp-handle is going to be more personal stuff) Mastodon: @layers@Fosstodon.org
Blue Sky: @MadewithLayers, if that ever pans out to be something viable
Facebook: Made with Layers for video updates and such, but yeah, I´m not a Facebook guy
YouTube: @MadewithLayers


Materials:

LED Neon strip

Tools:

Shaper Origin

Hakko soldering iron

Spray gun


All my video gear

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