I took a look around the web and saw the LED's being sold for presses and realized right away that it wasn't much of a project. I ordered two different ones on Ebay. One for $6.99 w/ free shipping out of Texas and a set of 5 for $4 from China. In retrospect I should have converted mm to inches as the one I got first was really a couple inches too long. It installed nicely but it's a little stressed going around the corner at the bottom and may or may not come loose eventually. (actually a piece of tape would guarantee it's position for life without it's own adhesive) It's about 6 inches long and the second set of lights that aren't here yet are slightly less then 2 inches long. They're also 12 volts, DC and I ordered some different colors hearing the blue was best. The one in this picture is a white LED and works great. I'll post pictures of the new ones when they get here.
Here's a picture of where it's installed on the Dillon 550. (This picture is shot with a flash since the lights aren't powered up.)
I just looked around the house in our unused transformer power supply box and found a 12 volt DC power supply which I might add seem to be everywhere in boxes at my house. I drilled a small hole in my bench near the press and ran the wire from the light down the hole and connected it to my 12 volt power supply. I could have installed an on and off switch and may but didn't care enough tonight to do it. Works fine and looks quite slick. Here's the results of the lighting. You can easily see the powder in the shell which is what I was after. (This pictures is shot without a flash to show what the LED does for illuminating the shells.)
LED's are also real forgiving. If you plug them in backwards they don't work. You reverse them if you got it wrong the first time and they work when you get it right. They also don't put out any heat. In the picture of my installation, two of the bottom lights are covered up with electric tape because 4 lights was plenty. They are rated at 50,000 hours of life and the strip is both waterproof (indicating to me no way a spark could ever get to the surrounding air) and flexible. They come with an adhesive back. I had to pull a 3M brand cover off mine to expose the adhesive. You can see where you could always just run tape around the bottom and top if it ever failed to keep sticking.
If you're interested in the recipe for the light just send me a message. If you haven't been on here more then two weeks your messages won't be turned on yet so you'll have to email me. Just put garyk@ in front of the name of this website and it will go right to me. Another way would be to register and respond to this post and I'll ask the server (since I own the site, no one else can do this) and send you where I got everything and who I bought it from.
Thanks for looking..
Gary
