Illuminated Flag Frame: LED Housing in an Extruded Aluminium Structure
A patented lit flag that always stays extended — LED bar, housing and brackets engineered into an aluminium frame that has to survive being left outdoors.
A flag that never sags and lights itself at night — a patented product that needed to become a manufacturable assembly.
The problem
The concept is simple and the engineering is not:
- A flag held rigid is a sail. Whatever keeps it extended has to take wind load through its frame and into the pole.
- LEDs inside an outdoor frame need a housing that carries the strip, diffuses the light and keeps water out of the electronics.
- The whole thing has to be assembled from parts a supplier can produce — extruded bar, brackets, end pipes, covers — with a sequence that a person can follow.
The approach
- Aluminium extrusion as the backbone. The frame is built around an extruded bar section: stiff along its length, cheap by the metre and already shaped to accept the LED housing.
- The LED assembly as a sub-assembly. The strip, its housing and its cover were designed as a unit that drops into the frame, so it can be built and tested separately from the structure.
- Brackets sized for the corner loads, where a wind-loaded frame actually fails, rather than uniformly around the perimeter.
- Closures on both ends. End pipes and covers finish the extrusion so the frame is sealed against water and looks finished from every angle.
The result
A full assembly design — frame, LED housing, brackets, covers and end components — carried through the client’s factory review, with answers supplied directly to the manufacturer’s questions on the mechanical schematics.
Where this applies
Outdoor products built from extrusion and brackets: signage, lighting, displays, frames. The design is mostly in the joints — what fastens to what, and what happens there when the wind blows.
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