Ideas for making a Custom LED portable work light Help?

Hello, I am trying to find the best way I can use LED lighting to make a custom portable work light. You have all seen the small shop lights that use 500 watt bubs. Well in my line of work , they don't last, they either burn out fast or else just the enviornment is hard on them and they are junk in no time. I want to make a custom light, I was thinking maybe LED's, How many LED blubs would it take to equal say the same amount of light that a 100 watt light blub will put out ?? I need a blub that is durable and LED are strong and can take abuse from what I have seen so far. Any Ideas , thanks To add to this, it has to be able to produce enough light to light up a room, not just a small light to look under the hood of a car. thanks

Public Comments

1. Wal Mart sells a nice LED work light for around $15.00 I'd say you can't build one for that.
2. I built a red LED "flashlight" for reading star charts while observing through my telescope. It's only a single LED with a potentiometer to control the brightness, so it obviously wouldn't be what you're looking for but... I've noticed bright white LED Christmas lights for sale lately for around $12 for a string of 60 LEDs. The entire string draws a little under 5 watts. Maybe you could take the LEDs from one or two of those strings and figure out a way to mount them and build a reflector around them if necessary and come up with something practical. I've read that LEDs have about 5-6 times the light output of incandescent bulbs per watt, so the the total light output from a string should be the equivalent of a 25-30 watt light bulb, if what I read is accurate. I've also read that single LEDs with more than 1 watt of power are practical for general lighting applications, so maybe having ~5 to 10 watts of LED light from 60-120 of the Christmas light LEDs would work out well. It's a pretty cheap experiment to find out.