Home made DIY LED lamps and others including big Calex LED lamps.

This is just a small selection of LED lamps. Some of which I made myself and some I bought.
The Calex lamps were bought from John Lewis in the UK.
The little 60 LED lamp I chopped the capacitor out of was from ebay.
The lurid disco lamp was also from ebay.
The others were all hacked together from old compact fluorescent lamp bases with hard wired capacitive current limiters and strings of LEDs wired in series. The circuitry in the bases was potted in resin. The LEDs are in small Molex type sockets with the polarity marked so they can be changed if desired. Many of the LEDs I used were side emitting LEDs salvaged from dodgy strings of Chinese christmas lights (we call them fairy lights in the UK).
The string of lights was an old tungsten string of 40 lights that I removed the lamps from and replaced the original glass lamps with LEDs by pushing the leads through the existing removable bases, bending them back and cropping them to size. The LEDs were all re-installed in the string with the same polarity from one end to the other, and a new ultra simple power supply was made using a standard bridge rectifier with a 10K resistor soldered to each lead. That effectively puts all the 10K resistors in series with the string of LEDs while also rectifying the supply to DC. The mains goes in via the resistors onto the rectifiers AC leads and the DC output goes to the LEDs again via two resistors. The whole rectifier/resistor arrangement was potted in a plastic cap with two part resin. The LEDs are run at about 3mA which compares favourably to the old tungsten lamps and will give good lifespan, Power consumption is under one watt. Power dissipation from the resistors is about half a watt divided between all four meaning they are well within their quarter watt rating.
Note that the LED string is being run on a UK 240V supply. In America or other countries with a lower voltage supply you would use less LEDs and lower value resistors.