Make an Ostrich Egg Lamp

A year ago, my girlfriend and I decided were posed with the challenge of finding a gift for her grandfather. This daunting task was made harder by the fact that we are talking about a man who has just about anything a person could need or want. We didn't want to gift him cigars, or alcohol or any of the other things that are normally gifted to older people. So we ended up thinking that an ostrich egg would be very creative. He absolutely loved it. We made a very big fried egg and enjoyed a nice family lunch with everyone eating from the same pan.

Fast-forward one year, and we are in the same situation again. What can we give this man? Well, we still had the egg shell, so let's make a lamp out of that!

• Ostrich Egg
• LED PCB
• Epoxy
• Wood PLA Filament

The first step is to find an ostrich egg. This might seem easier said than done. In our case, we found it easier to google it and find a local distributor. It cost us about 25 euros, but I've seen then for anything between 15 to 35 euros.

Once you have the egg, it must be cracked. An ostrich egg's shell is much harder than a regular chicken egg shell, so special tools might be needed (screwdriver, hammer, etc.). The attached video somewhat shows how to do this, but this link explains the procedure very well.

As we are college students, my girlfriend and I wanted to rely on mostly recycled supplies to make this gift. She had a little desktop lamp which had been purchased from Amazon a couple months prior which we essentially cracked open to scavenge for all the electronics.

In our case, the PCB had color changing LEDs, but that of course might not be the same for the one you use.

With the egg cracked open, we must now design a base for it. My girlfriend is a designer, so she made some sketches and found some references and in the end we picked a bed-side lamp. With that in mind, I got to designing the base. To do this, I had to measure the rough inner and outer diameter of the opening that we had created opening the egg. Once that was done, it was just a matter of finding a way to route the cable.

To print the parts, the parameters are as follows:

• Material
• Wood PLA
• Layer height
• 0.2 mm
• Infill
• > 10%
• Shell thickness
• > 1.2 mm
• Nozzle size
• 0.4 mm

I have attached the stl file for the part we ended up designing but the one you make might be slightly different, so use it as a base.

With everything printed and the egg prepared, assembly is as simple as glueing the PCB in place with hot glue and then glueing the egg with epoxy.

We asked my girlfriend's grandfather if he would be willing to pose for a photo but he said he would rather not, so here we attach some images of the moments before we gave him the gift.

This is a relatively simple Instructable, but it was the first time my girlfriend and I collaborated on a project. We had a great time!