Looking for a way to spruce up your place with a touch of rustic-future-deco? Why not embed LEDs somewhere they were never designed for? [Callosciurini] had a nice chunk of oak and decided to turn it into a lamp.
He was inspired by a similar lamp that retails for over $1,000, so he figured he would make his own instead (business idea people?). The oak is a solid chunk measuring 40x40x45cm and what he did was route out an angled channel across all faces of the cube. This allowed him to installed a simple LED strip inside the groove — then he filled it with an epoxy/paint mix to give it that milky glow.
To finish it off he sanded the entire thing multiple times, oiled the wood, and sanded it again with a very fine grit. The result is pretty awesome.
Now imagine what you could do design-wise if you could fold wood to make a lamp? Well with this custom wood-folding saw-blade, the sky is the limit!
[via r/DIY]
WOULD have been more interesting if light was filling natural splits that occur often in such large blocks of wood. Especially if former home of the pileated plasma woodpecker.
This. Also, having a bright LED strip to have to avoid looking at would get very annoying after a while. Better to have the lights in a hollow underneath, and place the block on a narrow, white/clear stand. It would work like a standard table lamp (indirect lighting = good), plus appear to float! (Granted, cord management might be difficult and/or spoil the illusion…)
Not every LED has a 50,000 hour life. They do fail more or less randomly. And MTBF compounds the more elements you have.
(I’m bitter because the other week on Reddit people were bringing up this point, and getting blasted by the hive mind essentially arguing back with “Nuh uh!”)
Ha!
The best LEDs have much shorter lifetime because they’re using secondary phosphors akin to a CFL to fill in the gaps in the spectrum, and the phosphors degrade much faster than the diodes.
Plain LEDs have awful awful, completely horrible color rendering indices. Get a color comparison chart, a cheap LED bulb/strip, a halogen bulb, switch between the two and watch half the colors become indistinguishable from each other when the “white” LED is on.
Only rarely do I see a LED fail, and if it happens it’s a LED lamp, and that probably is because of ineffective cooling or the driving circuit going bust, again because of poor cooling.
So that brings up a point, how do these LED hold up being encased in a thick layer of epoxy on one side and thick wood on the other?
But anyway, having some of them fail randomly might make this light even more interesting.
The internet. Slashdot rehashes Hackaday and Hackaday rehashes r/DIY. Just wow
I know right? It’s like when newspapers and TV stations report on the same thing, I mean, don’t they know the other guys already reported on it? Should we really have to bother scrolling past things we’ve already seen? That’s such bullshit, wasting my time.
Yes HaD is a collection of finds from all around the web.
Incidentally, there are about a million sites I hear, and personally I lack the time to check them all.
The internet is amazing. Slashdot rehashes HAD and HAD rehashes r/DIY. I know not everyone looks at reddit.. but HAD editors.. you could at least link to the original post on r/DIY 9 days ago:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/462ox4/oak_and_epoxy_led_lamp/
They did. The link is right there, at the end of the story.
Ooooo, pretty.
How much does a block of nice wood like this cost?
40x40x45 cm is 30.5 board feet (a board foot is one twelfth of a cubic foot, a common unit for lumber). In my area, thick, wide, rough-sawn oak planks are around $6 per board foot, so I’d expect to pay at least $185 for such a block.
Free if you’re good with a chain saw and know someone with an oak tree that needs to come down.
is it possible to get ‘end-grain veneer’? Probably would be thicker than regular veneer, but would allow some nice tricks in simulating solid wood blocks.
Yes, ikea have a fake natural finished wood table that is actually MDF with veneer. I had to look quite closely to spot the seems. I only notice because the showroom one had a big gouge.
He spend 150 dollars on a piece of wood alone…
Buncha’ city slickers wondering how much a piece of wood that size would cost…
There are these things called forests, see. And if you get up close to them you’ll discover they’re filled with these things called trees. Trees are made of wood, but they also make wood. It’s a little hard to understand, but thinks of trees as giant (very altruistic) 3D printers.
Most trees are standing up and pointing toward that blue thing (it’s blue out here, it might be gray where you live). We call that the sky. But sometimes trees get really tired and take forever naps. Then they’re on their sides, on the ground. It’s easiest to cut blocks of wood out of those napping trees. They don’t mind, and they won’t usually injure you in the process of extracting the wood.
You use these sharp pointy things called saws to cut wood from trees. Only cut the tree though. Saws and human flesh don’t mix, unless you’re hunting zombies but that’s different. There are a few intermediate steps involving drying the wood and removing the bark or shaping the wood, but those are straightforward. Once you’ve done that, you have pieces of wood that you can create things with. And nature gives them to you for free. It’s amazing, really.
+1
“There are a few intermediate steps involving drying the wood and removing the bark or shaping the wood, but those are straightforward.”
http://i2.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/572/078/d6d.jpg
Tried this, but I ended up with the exact same picture but without the branch. I feel fooled and silly having the owl just floating there.
+1 would read again!
Pfft… Everyone knows you punch trees to get logs. You put the logs in your crafting grid to get planks.
Drying large blocks of wood is a real challenge, takes lots of time to do it right and not have a cracked and split up mess.
10/10. Can confirm.
In this case you could use any cracks and splits to your artistic advantage. I’d rather put the LEDs in a crack than route a channel.
Well, how about routing a ridge in a rock instead?
That would be soapstone. Just about any woodworking tool also works soapstone. You can carve it with a knife, shape it with a router, even use a chainsaw to make sculptures. Fascinating stuff.