I just made a homemade reflector setup.
I ordered two 85W CFL from topbulb.com
I then bought two 6inch diameter 2 foot vents to use for reflectors. I also bought 2 lamp cords, two sockets with a little metal plate attached so they can be mounted horizontally and a 2-by-4. After working for it for a couple of hours this is what I ended up with. My wife still wants to paint it and I need to adjust the reflectors a little.
Hope this helps or inspires anybody in their search for light.

/Chris

Those vent pieces do make excellent ULTRA-cheap reflectors. I made five reflectors that way using the 2-foot lengths.

After painting one of the reflectors flat white, I compared it to an unpainted reflector. The flat white one seemed to cast a more even light, so I painted all of them flat white.

I would never pay money for a reflector after seeing how well this method worked for me.

Great idea!

Zink

I forgot to mention one thing. I fashioned a metal brace to spread the reflector apart, for better coverage.

From your photos, it looks like the light is being cast in a very narrow strip. However, that may be your intent - to keep all of the light concentrated on your shelf.

Whatever, your method does allow you to add any size brace later on, to optimize/customize the light spread. You get the reflector you want at almost no cost.

Zink

If my cattleyas have not flowered in three years! If they do not flower under this setup I give up. :)

/Chris

Sam

Can't wait! My plants have been living with a 42W bulb in its place since 2 weeks before christmas.

Sam

By brace, I meant just adding a 12"-13" piece of metal at each end to spread the vent apart.

With a larger radius vent piece you can make really good reflector for an HID light, too!

Off the topic, I noticed that your widest JPG established the width for all of the replies
which followed your post. None of the paragraphs were long enough to wrap around. One of
the standard Gardenweb HTML codes sets column widths using a "table width=90%" HTML
instruction. That instruction, combined with you widest JPG, makes it seem as though the
paragraphs also have a wide indent on the left.

I'm not being critical or anything like that. It just took me awhile to figure out what was going
on in the page formatting. I often have trouble figuring out how to make my message and graphics
appear the way I want them to. You can reduce the HEIGHT and WIDTH of a graphic
to make them fit better, but it it usually recommended that you shrink the JPG's instead, to fit
in the column width.

I cheated, and used NOTEPAD with normal 'carriage returns' to wrap this text

Anyhow, great reflector idea!

Zink