Layered Nightlamp

Each year I try to make something for our annual christmas party. We ussually have a limit of what we are allowed to spend so I like to make something with components that cost less than the budget, but if you were to buy the complete product in store would be much more expensive. For this year the budget was R100 or $US7. I had the bright idea to make a nightlamp.

The supplies I needed were as follows:

Wood - Had a old plywood pallet laying around

Plexiglass - Had some left pieces left from solar panel holders that I build for work

Power supply - Had one that was used for something at sometime in the past

LED strip light - Had a short strip left from a previous project

Screws - The only thing I had to buy

Short piece of 16mm PVC tube -

Tools for the making of it.

First thing was to draw a quick design of what I wanted.

Next I started with cutting a template for the marking of the other pieces.I have a picture of before I drilled and cut it but never took one of the template when it was done.

It started as a square lamp, but then I got the idea to cut off the corners while making the template.

The next process was to cut all the plywood and plexiglass into the right sizes. This was just repeated until there was enough pieces. I cut all the pieces using a jigsaw

Next was to drill a hole big enough for the PVC tube with LED strip wrapped around to pass through. I went with a 40mm holesaw. This was drilled into all the plexi and only the middle layers of the plywood.

In the two plywood end pieces I drilled holes just big enough for the PVC to go into. I also made a slot in the bottom piece for the wire to pass through.

Next was to put everything together. For this I used a glue gun to stick everthing together. I first built the middle part by sticking them to each other. It was a piece of ply wood then two pieces of plexiglass and repeat. Then I sticked the top part to it. The base was left apart from the rest.

To form the base I glued the PVC tube into the hole drilled in the base. The LED strip light was then glued around the PVC tube. The power supply was the soldered to the strip and then the base was attached to the resat using the screws. This is to be able to open it if the LED were to die.

For the final touches I took a grinder with a flappy disk to remove all the excess glue and rough parts. This also gave the burnt look on the wood that I was looking for. After this I just varnished the whole piece with waterbased clear varnish.

For the final step i switched off the lights and switched on the nightlamp.