Souvenir Crystal Stand by Yakutz

Last crawled date: 3 years, 3 months ago

I have travelled extensively for my career and whenever I went somewhere interesting I would buy one of those engraved crystal blocks as a souvenir. It got to the point where they were just piled up on my bookcase and not displayed to any effect so I needed a display rack.
I have planned to make this project for years but never got around to it. I wanted it lighted so I devised a way to light it effectively and inexpensively. Every time you go into a Harbor Freight store you can pick up a pack of two LED flashlights usually free with a coupon or maybe $1. I collected 20+ of these lights over the years. These would be the light source for my stand.
This stand is a complete intersection of every bit of my nerdiness. I used my woodworking skills, electronics and 3D printing CAD design to make this happen.
First was the light source. I took all of the Harbor Freight flashlights and cut them down on my bandsaw to get rid of the whole battery compartment and just keep the light assembly. I then wired up the light assembly with long wires for future use.
I then used Fusion360 to design custom stands for each crystal. Most are the standard shape but I have others that are very tall and skinny and others that are rectangles laid over on their side. In these stands, I included cylinders that were exactly sized to the light modules I cut from the flashlights. After a couple of proof of concept trial prints, I churned out 16 stands and mounted the light modules in them. This took forever as each stand took 8-10 hours to print.
I built the stand itself out of Shedua which is an African Rosewood. I made it tiered with a small gap between each level so the wires would disappear into the wiring cavity. I wanted the base to be simple because the focus should be on the crystals.
I didn't want to have to go over and turn on the lights whenever I entered the room so I designed a simple circuit that would sense when the room lights came on and turn on the display. I hid the sensor in the lower right corner of the base.
Once that was done, it was all down to wiring up 18 light units to my new light triggered power supply (I recycled one from an old Dell laptop) and set it up on the shelf.
I included the base Fusion360 object for the standard crystal. All of the others are variations of that one.