They are about 30 inches tall made from Tomato cages, leaving the large ring at at he base intact and modifying the diameter of two upper rings to create a cone. I pushed a piece of suitably sized steel tubing over the three legs at the top and applied copious quantities of "No-More-Nails" to bind the top together. The Bubble-Wrap was wrapped around and taped up with outdoor rated clear "sticky tape", usually used in the building industry to tape up PVC liners for concrete pours. I used short lengths inside to secure the bubble wrap to the legs. The Bubble Wrap has lasted 7 years of shows, and only required replacing this year, so longevity of the Bubble Wrap isn't really a problem
The light source was initially four 50 watt 12 volt halogen down lights pointing upwards, with colour gels over the Red, Green, and Blue lamps. I changed them all to LED's this year and have six 3 watt LED's of each colour mounted on sections of old PC Board's, that have had their components stripped off them, all mounted in a second hand round cake tin, with suitably sized dropping resistors and bridge rectifiers to allow them to be driven by the same switches and power source the old halogen lamps used. The 18 Watt's of each colour seem to be about correct as far as brightness is concerned, many calculations were involved to come up with the number used!! To keep the weather out of the light box/cake tin I covered the top with "Glad Wrap" held in place with the original cake tin lid which had had the center removed leaving a horizontal lip of about 1/2 an inch frame with the original vertical lip to hold it in place.
The stars on top came from a clearance sale at a "big box store" and originally had, a battery operated colour-changing set of regular 5mm LED's inside. I stripped these out and replaced them with a perspex star frame carrying 4 of each colour, 1 watt LED's. These are wired in parallel with the LED's in the cake tin so that both show the same colour at at the same time.
The "upgrade" has proved fantastic in that the LED's are much brighter than before, and react very much faster to the sequencer's commands. It took a while to do but very worthwhile.
Terry
