Step 6: A stack of glass
You may be thinking; "shouldn't the glass pieces be glued together?" This opens up a BIG can of worms. First of all just stacking the glass up works perfectly fine and how often are you going to move it anyway? To dust it you simply remove the top piece and clean it. Sadly it is not easy to glue the pieces together because you get bubbles in the glass which ruins the look of the light. Many types of glass glue as well as transparent silicon were tried along with several methods of clamping, nothing really worked. There is a way but it involves the building of a special containment cage as well as a specalized UV curing glass. You may even want to design some sort of copper wire containment cage or ????? This light has been in use for 4 months without incedent but we have not have an earthquake either.
Remove these ads by
Signing Up
Visit Our Store »
Go Pro Today »
Personally I'd build a cage around the glass - perhaps out of copper like the base - or maybe steel and then copper plate the steel. Copper plating is ludicrously easy with copper sulphate, though it won't be shiny or flat
there's glue, that would keep it stuck together, even if it were beaten on with an iron pipe, heck, even plain silicone caulking would do that. like someone said, the edges of non-tempered glass could be heat ablated(blowtorch on the edges), but it wouldn't look as nice, or be that much safer.
what i would go for, is different shapes... maybe spacers of different materials or sizes, a small blowtorch and vacuum vessel could be used to holes for an led stick to go through, for brighter light. with a hole through, a rod could be put through to make it a hanging lamp.
then there's the possibility of using a glass cutting hole saw, use an abrasive circular saw to cut squares with curved L shaped cuts inside, add wedge shaped spacers, a pot lid with a hole, perhaps a glass one. make two round ones, fit them together, face to face, put a circular fluorescent tube inside, rough the glass lid for frosting.
(... is this proper english?)
when you burn the edges the whole thing could stick together
but you have to consider the tension of the glass when it's cooling down
my first thought was to glue the glass together and use it to cast a mould, then use resin to create the actual lamp design. perhaps the center could be hollowed out by inserting a tube 3/4 of the way through the mould, which would decrease the overall weight as well. however, casting resin is pretty expensive which makes my idea sort of unrealistic... some nice ideas here in the comments, and the original is wonderful, of course.
could somebody try it? i dont have enough glass tiles at home and I dont want to break a window ^^
I'm fairly certain the driver for these kind of LED Pulse Width Modulate the current sent to the LED. A quick use of google leads to circuit example. Even one here at instructables, but why would anybody be surprised yo learn that? :)
In the event one could fie polish the cut edges, and maintain tight 90 decree corners. brass angle iron or wood corner trim could be used to keep the stacked plates in place. An original idea AFIK, I agree with the other commenter a nighttime photo of the lamp lit would be a nice addition the instructable.
Anyway, I'm curious, even though it doesn't get moved, how much does this thing weigh? It sounds very heavy.
It seems that the hardest part is breaking the glass! This comes from a stained glass artist.
This glass lamp was sitting on that wood.
Your hand is now taking a shower of glass.
unglued = coasters!