Sunflower desk lamp

HeuristicBishop · July 4, 2026, 7:24pm

Yesterday I had a fever of 103.7f
The worst thing about being sick is being bored.
Now that the fever’s broken let’s fix the boredom.

I’ll be making a little flower for my wife to use as a desk lamp. This will use “scavenged” parts that are just scraps from other lighting projects and a bit of cheap raw stock:

This project will be a first time with a few different techniques so if anything seems particularly silly…it might be. I’ve never done some of this stuff before

Petals

The plan is to use a single strip of 45mm off cut for each petal of the flower. This is about 50 lumens per petal. It’s difficult to find a use for these little segments so I’m hoping this ends up working out well:

The petal structure will be cut from 0.8mm 6061 sheet stock. I may try forming them to give just a bit of structure and dimension to each petal.
Stretch goal will be to rig up some kind of articulation for each petal but I’m not sure about that quite yet.

Stem

The stem will be a 6” length of hollow core goose neck. This is pretty convenient because I can run the power cleanly through the “stem”
This is terminated with a 1/4-20 female on one side and a 1/4-20 male on the other. That will make attaching the base and flower relatively straightforward.

Base (Vase)

I’ve decided a little plant pot is the best way to hide the electronics and finish out the look:

I can also pack it to provide a stable base in case the goose neck is bent way over. It shouldn’t be able to tumble just because of the flower position.

I started a stopwatch after gathering the misc materials and this is what I’ve come up with after 52:43 (All parametric so adjusting dimensions with the wife was trivial )

Modeled flat but I’ll likely just bend them in towards the center a bit. I’ll also dimple the center brass piece to add to the aesthetic.

Anywho, the project continues!

Update, it took about 20 minutes to get the thing converted to a sheet metal part and get the bends put in and rendered. Not terrible, it probably should have only taken 5 minutes:

HeuristicBishop · July 4, 2026, 10:39pm

Hehe in review, maybe just the design portions should be done in recovery and the milling is best left for the next day.

I didn’t have a great way to hold the plate down evenly. Usually I’d use wax but going over a large area wasn’t ideal. Couple that with the fact that the aluminum warps like crazy under the heat necessary to melt the wax…recipe for disaster.

I was going to just use double sided tape but I realized there would be no way to remove it without bending the petals. So I decided to use the double sided piece as a sacrificial plate just in case.
I stuck the sacrificial piece down with tape, sprinkled it with fixturing wax, threw the workpiece on top, heated it, and set my small surface plate on top to let it cool flat.

The start of the cut was beautiful. I was going to do it in two stepdowns to try and limit the force pulling up on the workpiece.

Unfortunately, my feeds were way off. Way too slow for the three flute I had in the spindle. By the time I got to the last petal, the chip welding had already set in

This is what a truly terrible recipe looks like. Doesn’t help if I only show you the good results eh.
(Luckily I’ve got lots of lye )

In short, I’m done for the day. It was a valiant effort and the design work was plenty valuable. Plus I learned that I really should figure out a vacuum table for the thin plates now that I’ve got a good pump…cough @wmoy cough

HeuristicBishop · July 5, 2026, 10:27pm

Ok I got a bit silly today. A day off isn’t for productivity anyway, let’s do some experimenting

Since it’s been 23 hours and Winston still hasn’t released a vacuum table, I figured I’d make my own. What’s he doin on a 4th of July weekend anyway if not increasing shareholder value

The Plan

I don’t keep mdf on hand or this would have been an easy win. I have plenty of material that could be used to make a proper vacuum chuck and I’ve even got a good bit of vacuum gasket to use with it…but that sounds like it would take a lot of thought since the materials would not be insignificant.

Looking through my chunks of raw stock I came across the perfect piece: a recasting test of red machinable wax in a pie pan. This thing has been kicking around for ages since there are no good reference edges and the top and bottom were both far from flat. A single pass with the McFly made quick work of flattening and the draft on the edges actually worked in my favor for work holding, forcing the chuck down into the table.

That’s a dirt cheap chunk of scrap that would make an interesting test. Could I just carve the relevant pattern into the top and port the side to make a workable vacuum chuck?
If so, would I be able to resurface the top and carve a new pattern? This seems like it could be a convenient way to do one offs or particularly wonky shapes quickly and easily.

The Pattern

Vacuum holding strength is a function of surface area, so I inset my original sketch a few times making Sure to leave plenty of islands to support the thin sheet. If I had just cleared the entire interior, the sheet would just warp down into the cavity. The islands ensure any unsupported spans are short enough to prevent bending the sheet.

Now just countour down 0.25mm (remember, holding force is a function of surface area, not volume. Going deeper just means I get fewer resurfacings for new chuck patterns)

The Porting

I just did one central port down the middle, with the side entry being a slight interference fit with the vacuum tube. To ensure the path was complete, I used a little blower (which is also just nice to have around the machine in general. Thanks for the rec Blondihacks )

Why is there a small ratchet in that photo
Well, the side port was too deep. There wasn’t enough clearance for the chuck of my drill and I didn’t have the foresight to add the port before carving the pattern. Turns out the mini ratchet with a bit of a jamming material(silicone wire) works perfectly to twist a drill through soft wax with very low clearance.

The Product

Did it work?
Heck yeah it worked! Though an unforeseen consequence is that the chips had essentially welded themselves into the vacuum chuck
This made it impossible to run another piece since the welded chips lifted the new sheet enough to cause significant vacuum leakage. Though rerunning the path with no material cleared the channels and it was ready to run again,
…ignore the blue wax, that’s just old fixturing wax I didn’t feel like cleaning off.

The chip welding to the chuck is kind of pretty, so that’s neat.

Takeaways

Vacuum work holding is incredibly convenient.
Wax chucks work in a pinch and do not necessarily require hardware or gasketing material.
I would much rather just punch this (experiment for another time)
It will be worth the time to invest some real effort and materials in a proper vacuum table. I’ve just got to decide on a pattern for the gasket cord

There were a ton of things I could have done differently but that’s not what this was about. Today I just wanted to have some fun and try some stuff. One of my favorite phrases is (vulgar, cover your eyes )
" Fuck around and find out." and today was a great application of the phrase.

Even though I’m making my own table, keep me on the list of folks interested in a proper nomad 4 table if/when it comes out