This past week I experimented with actually laser cutting wood for my light box slides (as opposed to cutting paper as I did last week). I think the 4 slides I made turned out well, but there are some things I would like to change and rethink about their design. Below you can see the layers in different configurations:
Moveable layers: Stars (rotates) and train (slides)
I used a mix of 1/4″ and 1/8″ plywood sheets. I’d bought the thicker wood (1 18″ x 24″ sheet) from Robosource, and the thinner wood (2 12″ x 12″ sheets) from the makerspace front desk in the Innovation Studio.
For now, I’ve only used the 1/8″ wood to hold moving parts in place (i.e. the sliding train and rotating stars), and all other pieces were cut from the 1/4″ sheet. Since layers with moving parts have 2 pieces of thin wood holding them together, they wind up being 1/2″ thick; the entire box is nearly 2″ thick, half its width/height. I think this is too much distance for light to travel through, and makes all the pieces look too spaced out from each other.
Another thing I tried was attaching paper to parts of the layers that I wanted to diffuse light – namely the windows of the building, train, and truck. You can see those pieces of paper here, taped to the back of these layers:
The effect was cool, but very limited by how far the light had to travel. This was most visible with the building windows – below you can see how quickly they darken as the building is moved back to front:
Positives
The biggest positive part of this experiment was the stiffness of the wood. With paper, each slide felt extremely delicate, and came apart easily – but since I was using 1/8″ and 1/4″ wood, none of the layers could bend, and the whole structure felt very solid.
Using wood also gave me a much better sense of how the final box would look. I was previously limited to using index cards to make the layers, but now I understand the actual dimensions, appearance, and texture of wood that I’ll be using. I still like the circle-in-square shape, and think I will continue with it for the time being. I will keep the circle-in-circle design that some other people proposed in mind, though.
Changes to Make
For my next attempts, I want to significantly reduce the thickness of each layer (and thus the whole box), to keep the design compact and stop the light from dissipating before it reaches the front layer. To do this, am going to ditch the 1/4″ wood entirely, and only use 1/8″ wood for everything. I’m also considering swapping out the 1/8″ sheets used to capture moving parts with some kind of stiff paper, since they don’t really need to be thick to serve their purpose.
I would like to look into other materials for diffusing light, as I think printer paper is too thick for light to pass through more than one layer.