Copper and Lights!

I had a lot of trouble joining my copper circles. I usually use silver solder for projects like this but I hit an issue when I found that my gas bottle couldn't reach a high enough temperature to melt the solder. After this trouble I resorted to using soft solder which I later came to realize was not a very good substitute. Two of my rings broke apart and needed constant care and repairs which was not ideal. The solder was also very bulky and took a lot of time and effort to sand off the surface of the copper.  

After a lot of sanding I polished the rings with jewelers metal polishes and polishing attachments for my Dremel. I used both tripoli and rouge polishes to give it a good shine and smooth finish. I wanted to get it shiny so that the light could reflect onto the lamp's surroundings.

One of the things I found from the first prototype was that the LEDs were too bright. My solution to this was to use a thin sheet of plastic covered in car tint. This not only meant that the lights were not as bright but also allows the bright yellow colour of the LEDs to be concealed while the lamp is turned off.

I used electrical tape to hold the LED strip in place, making sure to line up each globe with its hole. As I wont be able to access this area after the structure is fully assembled I needed to make sure that these will stay in place.

Int he below photo you can see the copper rings sitting in one half of the top circle, I intentionally lined up the join in the small ring with the top of the circle because this is not in direct line of sight when the lamp is positioned on a table. You can also see the wiring coming out of the bolt at the bottom. I used speaker cable for this because it is thin and comes joined together so it is nice and tidy. I coloured one side of the wire in red so that I knew how to connect it to the next component.

This was the first time I saw the lights working inside the structure and I was so happy with the result, the light is such a warm colour and not too bright to look directly at.