A Table Saw To Cut Solar Panels

saw

Steampunker extraordinaire [Jake von Slatt] loves the idea of solar-powered garden lights soaking up the sun’s rays during the day and powering a LED in the evening. Commercially available solar lanterns, as [Jake], you, me, and everyone else on the planet have discovered, are universally terrible and either don’t have solar panels large enough to charge a battery, or only last a year or so. [Jake]’s solution was to make his own solar lanterns and in the process he came up with a great way of cutting his own solar panels.

[Jake] turned to ebay to source 100 3″ x 6″ solar panels for about $30. These are broken panels, factory rejects, but still are able to produce the 0.5 Volts they should. Since these are rather large panels for a solar lantern, [Jake] needed a way to cut these panels into manageable sizes.

To cut the panels, [Jake] made a box to fit a Dremel with a right angle attachment and a port for a vacuum cleaner. There’s a sled for the panels with markings at 40, 80, 75, and 150 mm so the panels can be quickly cut to size with a diamond cutting wheel.

After the boards are cut, [Jake] checks them out with a multimeter to be sure they’re producing the half volt they should. After that, it’s a simple matter of soldering them together and adding them to his solar lanterns.

18 thoughts on “A Table Saw To Cut Solar Panels

  1. That’s one interesting way to cut them. I never thought you could cut them so well.

    I always thought that putting the pannel on the lamp is one of the worst places…. i thought a lot about using lamps connected through wire(leds are low power, so i could push a few watts through a simple twisted pair from UTP cable at 30V). … but that doesn’t make them so … wireless.

  2. FAIL in copying the original post’s title.
    Nobody is talking about cutting solar panels. Use common sense or google or Wikipedia to check what you are writing prior to posting, please.

  3. Neat! My walkway LED solar lights are almost all dead after a year and was thinking of making one large solar chargeable battery to power them all at a decent brightness. Will have to explore your method!

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