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Sat, 9 Dec 2017

Laser Menorah

— SjG @ 6:49 pm

You know, this title is misleading. The reality is a whole lot more boring. Maybe next year, I should take inspiration from the title.

This is more of a lazy Saturday afternoon project. I wanted to use some designs that I’ve been kicking around. So I took a sea of hexagons and a tree in Affinity Designer and mucked about for a bit until I had something where I more or less liked the look.

Next, I grabbed a slice of poplar (available in 8″ x 24″ x 0.25″ slabs at Home Deport, as “Hobby Poplar”) and drove over to CRASH Space. While it’s mega-take-apart-day, I scurried over to the laser cutter. I converted the design to PDF, loaded it up in Corel Draw, used the Epilog printer-driver, and sent it to the laser cutter. The poplar cuts very nicely.

Here’s a link to the PDF of the laser-cut portion, if you want to cut a copy yourself.2017-12-09-hexonorah-cut.pdf

I brought the pieces home, sanded lightly, drilled a few holes, and mounted the vertical piece onto the base, carefully mis-aligning it with the major axis of the elliptical base. Ah well.

I drilled holes where I would mount the candle holders themselves (after all, poplar is pretty, but not ideal as a holder for things on fire). For the actual sockets, I used some nice quarter-inch brass compression caps (also from Home Depot). I drilled a center hole, pushed through a brad, and then soldered it with a torch.

Next, let things cool, dried off the sockets, and put it all together.

The final result is not as attractive as I had imagined it. It’s a little … I dunno, squat? Perhaps the next iteration will have more dramatic tree-like branches emerging to hold the candles.

OK. Next year, forget the design. We’ll just go with lasers.