Chandelier (version 1)

I’ve been building chandeliers for a long time. I got a rough idea of this from an art exhibit, and making the first version consumed me for over a year. First, what it looked like:

The fixture itself is pretty simple: a frame of square acrylic tubing. I then used magnets inside the tubing to hold alligator clips, which held up a sheet of paper tubes. There was a lot of testing of clips, magnets and paper, and rolling all those tubes was tedious, but the end result was good enough to hang up. Barely. Here are some photos explaining the mechanism, and some tests with colored lights:

The things I learned:

  • How to work with acrylic- cutting, welding, drilling, polishing.
  • Paper types, weights.
  • Various adhesives for bonding paper.

And the things I didn’t think worked:

  • The light pattern on the table was good, but the overall light quality was bad.
  • The fixture was stable. Ish. But it was so lightweight that it would swing pretty easily.
  • The paper tubes started failing, becoming unglued due to the heat.