aLITigator lamp
fall 2024
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As a gift for my friend who was going through a tough LSAT season, I decided to make an alligator-shaped lamp, or an a-LITigator. It was essentially a lasercut acrylic lamp, edgelit from the bottom with an LED strip and attached to a finished wooden base.
My first exciting challenge was creating the shape and pattern for the alligator! I wanted a sketch of an alligator that looked like a lawyer, with a tie or glasses maybe, looking academic. Unfortunately since I am not a great sketch artist, I decided to turn to AI image generation.
I used Canva, and my prompt generated the image on the left, which I then imported into Adobe Illustrator to transform into a black and white sketch for the laser cutter to raster and cut out from the clear acrylic. The finished acrylic piece is shown on the right.
Making the base was a bit harder than the acrylic, because there were more machining steps than automated laser cutting. I cut two wood planks and another acrylic sheet to the same size to create a sandwich so that in addition to the alligator, there would also be light coming from the middle of the base.
To attach the acrylic to the wood, I decided to cut a slot inside the wood and press fit the acrylic inside. This way, the acrylic could be lit from under the wood, making assembly easier. Cutting the slot was a bit challenging because I had to drill many holes and chisel the slot until the acrylic fit well enough.
After the slot and additional holes for LEDs were finished, I sanded and stained the wood with coffee because I wanted a beautiful natural color and nice smell for the base. I then sealed the wood with linseed oil to make it waterproof.
For the final steps, I needed to attach the LED strip to the acrylic and solder the strip to the power supply. Soldering the LED strip was fairly straightforward because I bought a Govee RGB LED strip that is easy to cut and solder on the labeled solder pads.
Attaching the wood to the acrylic proved to be slightly more challenging. Initially I determined epoxy to be the best adhesive for two different materials like wood and plastic, but I used a fast-drying epoxy and I did not act fast enough for the two surfaces to form a proper bond. Next I tried superglue and this seemed to be incredibly effective to bond the two surfaces.
For the final touch, I lasercut a small black gavel with an inscription for my friend and attached this to the back of the lamp using acrylic cement.
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