Cardboard Lamp
Introduction: Cardboard Lamp
I saw a cardboard lamp somewhere and I thought that it looked really cool. I have a laser cutter so I wanted to try it myself.
Supplies
2-wave quality carboard, thickness about 7,5mm
2 Lamp base with wires.
Glue (normal wood glue is fine)
CO2 laser
Step 1: Design
This was kind of easy to design. I do not have any other design programs than Lightburn. But Lightburn is overall really good program. ( I wanted to write this so you can understand that this can be done with almost any program).
Lamp area size is about 80 x 50cm
I wanted the side shape to be like ellipse. First I drew a ellipse. Carboard thickness is about 7,5mm so I filled the ellipse with 7,5mm height bars. Then I used Lightburn Boolean intersection to make all the bars even with ellipse.
That is how I got the outside dimensions of the each circle.
From the side lamp is going to look like ellipse, from up it's going to look round.
I wanted two ellipses to merge together and second one little smaller than the first one.
I used numbers with every layer so it would be easier to assemble.
I wanted glue area to be about 15mm for each circle. I calculated inside diameters like that.
Step 2: Laser Cut and Assembly
As you can see from the attached DXF, there is black line for cutting, and the blue line is for drawing the next piece.
This is quite big and it was really difficult to glue these on the right place. So this blue line will help a lot. I used 150mms and 10% power and I have 100w CO2.
I did not know before what is like to glue cardboard. So I used a lot of glue, too much. And I used normal wood glue. 492
I just wanted to secure that it would hold. Now I think that much smaller amount would also hold really good.
Gluing order: First all the merge pieces. It does not matter does the engraved number come up or down because its mirrored image.
After merge pieces glue all the pieces down from the merge pieces. That is because then you will sitll have a flat bottom so the upper pieces are easier to glue finally.
Before cutting the final pieces you should check you lamp base diameter, these were 40mm so I made that hole to final pieces.
After gluing time to test how it looks with lights on.
Step 3: Finish
As I said before, I used way too much glue.
It did not look so glue in the day light. So I painted it with metallic black. I only painted straight surfaces, I did not want to paint all the vawes so I would not block the light coming from the inside.
I also made this wooden bar with laser cutter, where I pinned the wires and then I used screws to attach that on the ceiling.
Then it was finished.
Step 4: Final Summary
This was really nice project to make.
I will do second better version soon, you know that always after the first version you know the flaws.
I cut almost all the cardboards as the same way. That was mistake. Because cardboard does not give you any light on someway and gives you light someway. So every second layer waves should be facing different way, thats how the light would come out 360 degrees. Now I barely get any side light. Did now know this before.
One is that I used too much glue, so much smaller amount would have been enough.
With the desing I left the center piece in the middle because I thought it would be stronger with that. That is still true but for the next i will leave that out completely. This cardboard is strong enough without that center piece.
Otherwise for the first cardboard project it went quite good. 220