Pictures of my...no, I can't do it.

So here is where I'll show you the different phases of the glowing orbs I'm using to top my cane. Here they are, in no particular order:

This is the clear UV ball with the UV LEDs underneath in their reflective harness. This is also in near-total darkness, as I'm sure you can see. The reflective setup really makes a difference with having the ball glow more or less uniformly. You'll notice you can't see the beams of light going through the ball at all. Success!


This is the same ball lit up in regular lighting. Actually it's a bit brighter than that, but still. You can see a bit of a blue glow to the ball, but not much of one. The really great thing with this ball is that it will glow bright white when exposed to flash photography, so that's neat.


Here's a quick shot of what the ball looks like when you take a picture of it with a flash. Pretty cool, huh?



This is the ball in regular no lights style. Still looks very cool. I think it's a winner.


This is the white ball in regular lighting. you can see how freakin' bright it is even with lots of ambient light. This is a 4-LED setup with a tiny tiny 12-volt battery in the harness. Sweet. I'm tempted to do this with the UV ball as well, just to pump more light into the ball. We'll see.


This is the ball lit up in a dark room. Very cool and very bright. You can easily use it to see your way down a darkened path or read a map or something. very handy, very cool looking. I just wish I could get the exact same ball without all the gouges and blemishes.


This is where this ball fails, basically. It just doesn't look quite cool enough when it's turned off.



Well there you are! You can see what I saw and hopefully come to the same conclusions I did. Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.

A link to some inspiration

Great Site: Volpin Props

Saw this site a few places in the past few days and have read it over multiple times since. It's amazing. This guy does incredible work and produces truly astounding copies of various movie and video game objects and characters. It really humbles and inspires me.

I have a tendency to think that any good prop must be made of authentic materials to be "worthy" and that really limits me. If I don't have the tools to work the appropriate material, I don't do the project. What I need to be doing is what this guy does: Look at what I can work and use finishing techniques to make it look right. I can build most anything out of MDF with tools I already have. I can sculpt clay into just about any shape and then make resin copies. Really, with my current tools, very little is actually out of my reach. I have been thinking too much of making copies as opposed to replicas. A few projects I've got in mind could definitely be viable now, based on the techniques this guy is using. Mostly, I need to get some of these resins and mold-making materials to practice a bit.

So anyway, there's that. I have some great pictures I just haven't loaded on here yet. I'll try to do that shortly.

Success-ish!

So I got the UV LEDs and a new tiny battery than can power both of them without much trouble. I'm hoping that it'll last a long time since the LEDs pull so little power. I'm definitely setting it up so that I can change the battery, though. Not putting this much work into it to have it not work later on.

I've decided that I don't want to sink the Maglite into the handle. That's too much work and too little control. I got super ultra mega bright white LEDs from RadioShack and I'm going to power two of them with the same little battery, and see if they have the same effect as the Maglite. It would be nice, since I already have a nice little pocket dug out where all the wires and everything would fit. I also really want to have the switch so I'm not wasting power with it. Having to open the thing up just to turn it on and off isn't cool. I think I can make it all look cool, too. I'll put some metal piece of the plastic switch to make it look better. Maybe a big round head from a stainless rivet or something.

The UV reactive ball has an eerie glow to it. It isn't as bright as the other, but it's definitely cool. Right now I have an issue with the LEDs focusing up through the ball and projecting tiny UV spots on the ceiling. I'm hoping to line the inside of the copper collar with some reflective tape and a few little structures made of cardstock or something to help reflect the light around inside. I'm hoping that will help to keep from projecting beams through the ball.

I really want the light to get into the ball and stay there. That's easy with the white ball, but the clear one is posing an issue. I'm going to get the materials for the white one ready, since the ball is way cheaper, and use my current contact juggling ball as a tester for the UV LEDs. I'm planning to get them both built and see how I like them before really deciding between them. This is the nice thing with doing this so far in advance.

I also checked out the sample copper collar piece with the lacquer on it yesterday and it's looking very good. The wood is gorgeous with the stain and the clearcoat on it. It really has a great grain to it and the stain I found brings it out beautifully. The clearcoat is also protecting the finish on the copper. It isn't quite keeping a mirror polish, as the lacquer probably isn't as smooth as the metal, but it's definitely keeping it looking nice and keeping it from tarnishing. I'm still working on how I want to get the whole thing put together, but I think it's going to be amazing when it's done. I'm just hoping it lives up to the image I have in my head.

Glowing Ball Issues

Okay, I've gotten all the pieces I need for my walking stick, and I've even made a prototype of the copper collar that goes around the top. I also rigged up a simple circuit for the light and checked it out. Here's my issue. The light I created is a very pretty blue LED powered by three AAA batteries in a little harness and turned on with a switch. Shining it through my contact juggling ball showed a problem, though. Because the ball I want to use is a perfect, clear sphere, it acts as a lens. The light doesn't get trapped inside the sphere, it moves through with remarkable efficiency. Really, the ball just focuses the beam of light on the ceiling and the ball appears to be glow to a very small extent. With a super-hyped up flashlight, there's a visible beam cutting through the ball, but that's it.

So, what to do? Any clear ball is going to have a similar problem, I fear. The clear ball will look neat, but it doesn't do the glowing thing very well. So I am presented with another option. Since I was into contact juggling for a time, I also have a semi-transparent white polypropylene ball I used for practice. It was pilfered for me by a friend of mine in college from one of those Ice Ball skee-ball machines. I can't condone thievery for the sake of hobbies, but what's done is done, and this ball has been my size tester for a while now. It's about 3" in diameter, and weighs a few ounces less than my acrylic ball. Great for practice, as it makes you have a lighter touch than the real acrylic ball. It also happens to look freaking awesome when you shine a flashlight into it. It glows very uniformly, being only a little brighter at the bottom (where the light is) than the top. The LED I have on my setup right now isn't strong enough to get this result, so I'd have to take a friend's suggestion and bury a mini-Maglite under the ball inside the handle. This gets me past the problem of not having enough power, for sure. With the Maglite under the ball, the thing actually glows brightly enough for it to be helpful when traversing darkened paths. So that's awesome. The downside is that I can't rig up an external switch on it (at least I don't know how to do so now) so I would have to turn the light on, drop it into the stick, put the top assembly on and just leave it on until the batteries die. I've got plenty of rechargeable batteries now, so that's not too big of a deal, but swapping the batteries would be at least a little bit of a pain. So that's the downside. I'm also not entirely comfy with the idea of drilling so far down into the handle. I'm digging the grooves pretty deep to get a good design on the wood, and I really don't want to drill out the side of this thing. I'll have to see if I can do this some way so I can feel comfortable with it. It may involve getting a longer copper collar and just housing the light mostly in that instead of in the wood.

My other option, one that just occurred to me last night, is to use a UV reactive acrylic ball and UV LEDs in the base. A UV reactive ball has a subtle, pretty glow under UV light. It would potentially look a little more ghostly and eerie, as the entire ball should be glowing pretty much consistently. My contact juggling ball is UV reactive, so I have a test subject at least. I'll go grab a UV LED tonight and slap it on my circuit to see how it works. I'll probably take pictures of the two options to see what looks better, and then post them on here.

I've also started a quick test for the copper and brass components of the collar and footing. I had polished the copper footing to a near-mirror finish and then watched it tarnish up very very quickly. That's not cool. So now I polished up my prototype collar and test-stained the wood, attached the collar with the brass rivets (not peened, just used as pins to hold the collar still) and then sprayed clear lacquer on the whole thing. I've gotten 3 good coats on it and have left it for almost a whole day now. I'm planning to leave it at least another day before I touch it at all. What I want is to see how effectively the clear coat stops tarnishing and maintains a pretty polished look, but I also don't want it to get smudgy and gross-looking or anything. We'll see how it all pans out, I guess.

Groovy

I drew the lines onto my cane, then cut small grooves with a triangular file, and now I've got the rattail file working. I need to finish these all the way down, and then probably go back and do another pas to get them deeper. then i need to decide whether I'm going to try to use chisels to cut away the corners or files. I haven't decided yet as each has its own benefits and detriments.

Essentially, filing is slower but more precise. You're taking off tiny particles instead of larger pieces, so it's easier to make sure you don't take off too much. Chisels take off material much more quickly and can still give a nice finish. Really, I'm just not sure which to do. I may try chisels first and see how this wood likes them and the go to a file if the chisels don't work well. I don't know. I haven't done carving this extensive on western cedar before, so it's sort of an experiment.

Here are some pictures of what I've done so far:


These are the lines drawn onto the cane. You can see the angle and width I get from doing 5 lines with a 1/3 twist. Doing more lines means you don't have to cuts as deep with the files to get a good-looking rope braid look to them, but you have to do a lot more of them. I figured it would be easier and cooler to make them wider and less twisty and make them nice and deep.


You can't really see, but this is what it looks like after the triangular file. You really can't get too deep with it, it just creates a bit of a groove so the rattail file doesn't slip all over.


better shot of the initial grooves. You don't need much, really. This part wasn't too tough, just a little time consuming to do all of them all along the cane.

Here's the rattail file and the grooves it cuts. You can see they're rounder and deeper. The grit on the rattail file is much more coarse than the triangular file which means it'll cut a lot faster.


You can really see the shape of the cut on this one. I'll need to go back into these with the triangular file to get an angle into the bottom so they get the right look. I've made a little bit of a diagram showing what they should look like from the side (they'll be angled as well, but you get the idea).


The grooves will be round across the top and come down to a point between them. That's the idea, anyway.