The LED Bar

This project was designed and built by me with a little help from my son and two guys I used to work with at a former employer. The customer had this custom bar built in the man cave which included some translucent marble quarried in Brazil, I was told. The top and bottom appear to have been cut from the same piece of stone as the swirl patterns continue across both. There is a 1 inch space between the stone and the plywood structure underneath.

The LED lighting was designed to be modular and easily reparable should anything go wrong. Whiteboard was cut into square sections of about 18 inches and covered in LED strips of warm white 5050 chips. These are 12V LEDs and are driven from MeanWell 24V 300W dimmable drivers. There is one driver for the main bar and one driver for the shelves behind the bar.

Each of the LED panels have barrel connectors at both front corners allowing them to be connected in daisy chain fashion. The bar was measured beforehand and the panels designed to fill the spaces beneath each piece of stone. The panels are connected in series pairs (12V each, so 24V fed to each pair), then the pairs are all connected in parallel. The LED strips were cut and hot glued to the panels 1 inch from each end and spaced 2 inches apart. That way as the panels are placed under the stone side by side, it produces a uniform 2 inch spacing of LED strips all the way down the bar. The LED strips were then covered with plastic diffuser panels so the individual dots would not be seen in the final project.

Acrylic square stock was cut into squares about 7/8 inch tall (so that when glued on top of the whiteboard squares, they'd be exactly 1 inch overall thickness.) These acrylic blocks were sandpapered on two sides and the top to act as light pipes in addition to their main purpose which was to support the marble. They were then hot glued in a pseudo-random fashion on the panels every 6 or 8 inches.

The panels slid into place with very little effort. There were places where we had to gently flex the marble up to slide them in. Thankfully this went well and with no drama. In a few photos the stone masons are seen with their suction cup tools helping us to get the panels under the marble without damaging it.

This was a very enjoyable project and I am proud of the final result. Hit my contact links from the main website if you would like more details.

Enjoy some more photos

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