Night Light V1.0

Following up on the prototype I made a week ago.

This one is walnut, about 8" tall and 9" wide at the base.

Some major changes in the build and light panels setup.

It all begins with the design, in this instance it is the Tree Of Life (TOL) that I have embellished previous projects with.

The process begins with a mirror, cut to 6" x 6". These have a black backing (paint) over the silvering. This black backing completely blocks all light.

I covered the back with some contact paper (shelf liner) for use as a masking. Then it is off to the laser for some etching.
First run is a low power approach that removes the masking on the trunk of the TOL plus just enough removal of the paint to get a small amount of light to pass.
I wanted the trunk to be visible while the light is on, but stay in the background. The full light is to be shown in the leaves.
Next laser pass was to burn away the masking and the black paint + all silvering.

There were two options for the leaves, this one left the mirror glass frosted which diffuses the light.

The other option I used was to leave the glass perfectly clear. To do this, I etched away the leaves just as I did with the trunk, albeit just a bit hotter to burn away more of the paint. This way the silvering was exposed but not the glass.
Before repeating the trunk as before, I submerged the mirror in some driveway cleaner (HCl acid, 10%) plus some hydrogen peroxide on a 3:1 ratio, acid to peroxide.

This ate away all the exposed silvering for clear leaves.

Anyway, back to the first mirror.
Here I daubed some TransTint yellow dye with a Q-Tip into some random leaves. The masking kept the excess dye from staining the black mirror backing.

After the dye dried, I peeled off the mask and applied a sealing coat of poly. This became the visible side of the mirror.


Onto the frame!

Four sides, with mitered corners and a dado to hold the various glass bits.

Dados are about 1" deep since I wanted a circular opening about 5-1/2" diameter exposed.

Top corners were glued up and the bottom part that attached to the base was left taped only.
The template shown was used to trim the circle, profile the sides, and square up the bottom.

The base started as a 3" x 9" blank, profiled with a template and various holes located with a 1/16" drill bit.
A second template was used to carve out the recesses for the LED circuit boards.

You can see the row of eight multi-color LEDs on the blue circuit board. I needed to get these aligned with the upper TOL frame.

Above you can see the lower part of the frame is attached (double sided tape) to the base and a slot routed for the LEDs.
Sitting on the lower right corner of the base is a stick of glass with polished edges. This acts as a light guide to bring the LED light up about 1/2" through the wood from the circuit board without loss.

The night light was assembled without any internals to apply some Osmo wax. Didn't want the finish to get on the glass.

Taken back apart, the frame bottom was glued to the base and had the glass "light tube" fitted.
You can also see a penny used for the touch switch as on the prototype.

Here you can just see the LEDs in a row through the top.

Internals added:

I managed to get the IR remote control pickup installed in the center (upper portion of the arch) and used a cab doohicky as a lens to bring in the remote's beam.

The Glass.

For this version I had the TOL mirror behind a piece of art glass for protection. On the other side of the TOL mirror was a piece of textured Wissmach glass to better refract the LED light. Behind that is another mirror placed at an angle to reflect the light off the frame back.

The yellow dye gives an effect of having the leaves color varied instead of all the same.
Colored leaves will take a new color different from the background.
Couldn't capture a good photo however.

Spousal unit thinks I should have left the masking on so that the tree shows up even when the internal LEDs are off (just not white, maybe a blue or something spray painted).
I agree! (v2.0 perhaps)

Thanks for reading!