The most wonderful time of the year

I always love making stuff for Halloween. Since my girls are old enough to handle most of their own costume work these days I decided to work on something for decorating the house. At Bay Area Maker Faire this year I saw a really cool lamp design by the folks over at Full Spectrum lasers. Since they were kind enough to post svg files on their website under the project area I decided that was a good place to start. I did a few modifications to make the design a bit more to my liking (adjusting scale, making the globe a bit spookier looking, etc.) I grabbed some 1/4' plywood and started cutting on the Glowforge.

Regular plywood (as opposed to Proofgrade) can be a pain because there is often knot holes in the middle that have been filled with glue and are hard to cut through. The result is cuts that didn’t go all the way through everywhere and you spend a lot of time with a box cutter or x-acto knife trying to cut the parts free. However, once I did that I was able to start painting it.



Assembly was fairly straight forward, though I may further adjust some of the pieces like scaling up the two rings that look like gears and the 24 ribs that go around the globe to make them easier to fit together. I picked up an LED yellow bug light and a hanging lamp cord from Ikea to finish it off.



I may try adding highlights and using a black light bulb as well, or maybe filling the globe with glow in the dark super balls. Either way, I need to make a big spider web for the front porch for this guy before the end of the month