Introduction: Handmade 3D NASA Light

By Stephanie Heinz Photographer
About: I'm a survivalist, photographer, Drone Pilot and artist. I make things from a lot of different materials and love nature, animals and gardening.

My sister turned 60 this spring and she loves space and anything connected to space, I thought I have to make her the most amazing birthday present ever and hence I made a handmade 3D NASA light.

Step 1: Template

First off I needed a template, I printed a NASA logo on 4 A4 sheets and taped it together, then I started to trace the red "arrow" thingy on a A3 sheet and the letters on an other A4 sheet.

Step 2: Cut Your Templates

After I was done I cut the templates, mind not to cut them too close to the lines, you want some space between the line and the edge of the paper.

Step 3: Glue Time

Glue your templates to some sort of board, I used a simple OSB (oriented strand board) board as the base in this project.

Step 4: Cut the Tamplates

Wait until the glue is dried up, preferably over night, then cut them out using your favourite cutting tool, I used a jigsaw. In the second picture you can also see the fiber optic cables that are going to be used in this project, the black tubing you see is a small pneumatic tube in witch I have put a steel wire to be able to shape it the way I wanted, I cut one end and used hot glue on the other end to get it in to the right shape. In the round board I drilled holes where the stars on the logo is.

Step 5: Paint Job

No pictures of the paint job since I have covered that process in another Instructable

https://www.instructables.com/id/Aluminium-Tape-Art...

But a brief run trough of the aluminium tape/paint work is:

Tape all parts with aluminium tape, wrinkle the tape to get some structure then paint it all with acrylic paint. If you want a more comprehensive guide to that sort of art just follow the link.

Step 6: Let It Glow

Sine me and my sis lives some 400 kilometres apart I can't easily change a bad battery or broken light for her I needed an easy to change light source. To get the right kind of glow I used a UV flash light. Nailed the flash light to the board using some metal mesh that I cut to length, when it was secured I zip tied the fiber optic cables together and nailed it down a bit to.

Step 7: Finishing Touches

After a test run of the light I hot glued all the pieces together and behold the finished NASA logo light :)