Final Demo
Final Product
Idea
I came across the following video just a few days ago before I learned how to use the laser cutter. That giant but minimalistic installation creating a fantastic hologram caught my eyes immediately. I decided to DIY a smaller scale hologram with Acrylic using the laser cutter.
Prototype
The DIY hologram examples that I found online were very crude: four transparent and thin trapezoid pieces of plastic combined to a pyramid shape with scotch tape (refer to inspiration image above). To design a more elegant and stable hologram, I decided to frame the pyramid with top and bottom covers and supportive structure.
Since the laser cutter is not safe for engraving cardboards, which might cause fire easily, I cut a square hole on each corner to place supportive sticks. I used a digital caliper to measure the width and length of the black Acrylic sticks.
After measuring the height of the pyramid plus top and bottom cardboard, I used band saw to produce 4 segments of the black Acrylic sticks.
Finally I laser cut all the pieces and put everything together with blue tapes.
As I took a close look at my prototype, I noticed that on each single trapezoid, there was a tiny hole. I rechecked my design in illustrator and found that I forgot to delete the “center”.
Material
6” x 12” x 1/8 ” clear Acrylic board, 0.23” x 0.23” x 12” black Acrylic stick, hot glue gun, and Acrylic cement, and black Acrylic painting.
Implementation
After prototyping with cardboards, I applied some engraving tests on my transparent Acrylic board. The conclusion is that to obtain the depth I wanted, I had to engrave four times. Besides that, since the laser cutter could not engrave straightly but with some angles, I adjusted the length of the side from 0.26” to 0.24” in order to place sticks more stably.
Then I went ahead to engrave and cut the Acrylic board.
The cardboard pyramid turned out to be a great jig for me to glue my acrylic trapezoids together. The Acrylic board is 1/8” thick, so when they tiled to shape a pyramid with a square open on the top, the adjacent pieces only share an extremely thin edge. In that case, instead of using cement specifically for acrylic, I turned to the glue gun. I first used scotch tape to fix the shape by overlapping acrylic pieces on the cardboard prototype. Then I carefully inserted glue between the slots.
After finished my pyramid, I came up with another idea. I wanted to make my hologram rotational with gear connections. To achieve that, I searched online to gain more knowledge about how does the gear work.
After some tests on producing gears, I finally obtained one big and three small gears to make the pyramid rotate.
I painted the bottom board black to avoid reflection from it. To make the gear connection more stable, I laser cut several tiny pegs and placed them at the center of each gear.
Here two demos that I tested rotation with gears.
The last step, glue every piece together.
And here is how it looks finally.
Appendix
