Polish & Present: Karin Plante

This week was a big week in regards to finalizing the construction of my piece. As talked about in class, the major issue I was facing was how I was going to actually attach the sets of four triangles together into square pyramids. We had discussed my concerns with soldering, mainly that the tips of each triangle were a weak spot that might crack with the applied heat of a soldering iron. Additionally, we talked about several epoxies and glues; however, I finally decided that I would simply use copper tape to tape the triangles together. I liked the look of the copper tape that was already attached the glass in preparation for soldering, so I thought that continuing to use this would be perfect and would mitigate the risk involved in heat or solvent based fusing techniques.

Taping Process

Once taped together, the structures actually hold up pretty well and I’m not concerned about breaking them with normal handling. After a lighting test, I decided I needed to make a box to hide the wires and to make everything self-contained and neat. While I couldn’t totally avoid the need to open the box to power the LEDS (because the box was too thick), I decided I was okay with that, as for display, it would be always “on” and there would be no need to open the box to get to the switch.

Painting the box which will hide the wires

To finish everything off, the mirrors were polished and one final test was run. I really like how the effect came out. On some sides you can see the infinity effect while on others you cannot. This depends on the color combination. As such, I’ve left the pyramids physically detached from the box, so users can change the outer pyramids orientation to change the color schemes. I believe it has a very cool effect.

 

 

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