Modding Uniformly lighting acrylic sheet

Non PC modding question. I want to frame and back-light an old stained glass window (originally came out of my great grandfathers house - it was his coat of arms and dates from about 1880). I have the frame and window ready for the lighting and I was thinking of using a piece of acrylic sheet with LEDs drilled and mounted along the edge to try and disperse the back-lighting as evenly as possible. I'm lazy and don't fancy soldering 40 odd LEDs, so thought I would find a set of white 3mm LED Christmas lights. I need to run this off the mains, so the transformer that these come with will come in handy.

Question - what is the best acrylic to use to get an evenly dispersed white light? Frosted white (tricky to get hold of), plain white or can I just orbital sand some clear sheet for a DIY frosted effect - looks are secondary to performance as the acrylic is going to sit on the back of the frame.

 

Just get some clear acrylic and buy some krylon matte finish and spray the acrylic down. Its gives it this nice frosted look. That's what I'm doing for my project right now to get a frosted look. I will be using vinyl stencils to get the design I want on my plexi.

 

or use a finse piece of sand paper and frost both sides with it, thats what i did, works really well

 

It depends how long the piece of stained glass is. I've seen some pretty good results with a sanded piece of acrylic and white cold cathodes. The cold cathodes will give you a more uniform light along your surface, but they only go 12" max I believe.

The project I'm thinking of is Xp's black Ice, check this post out - http://forums.bit-tech.net/showpost.php?p=783289&postcount=37

 

I was just going to suggest cathode(CCFL) and use a stuff called glass frost i did a few mods with it and it looks good

 

Thanks for the suggestions. The window is 75cm by 50cm so fairly large compaired to a case window. Cold cathode could be an idea but I don't think I will have the room to mount them flush on the back of the frame.

 

You could make a frame like 1 inch thick and mount 4 or 5 of them in the back,they're only 1/4 inch.Your frosted glass and the window. it all depend on the frame you choose, it would not show,Some old fashion frames are already fairly thick. in some cases i even saw someone using these white cold cathode in a basement to simulate a frosted window and it looked like daylight.