Originally Posted by
jbkuma
Thank you! High praise from someone who has crafted one of the great beauties of our day. The button design has had a lot of surprises for me, but it has worked out better than I'd hoped. The pins give a nice tactile feedback on an otherwise nearly flush button. I have gone back and forth on whether I wanted to do it from the beginning as the more simple, sleek design looked really nice. There really is not a lot of room for another method of keeping the brass insert from rotating, though. I wasn't as careful as I could have been in their alignment, but it works for now. Perhaps the asymmetry is part of the charm.
The current surround material is a translucent glow in the dark that shifts my color mix toward white pink as it absorbs some blue and makes it green. The purple looks great for about 30 seconds before the shift. I was hoping it would be more insignificant, as leaving a glowing ring when it's shut down is also a pretty nice effect. I'm debating the appropriate material to redo it in as I start finalizing the build. I'm worried that a frosted clear material might not diffuse the lighting enough, but the current material mixes and diffuses (color shift aside) fairly well, it absorbs a great deal amount of light to do so. I may have my friend make it up using clear filament instead of shipping it off to shapeways since the rougher quality of the print should help. The design of the piece would necessarily be simpler, but the prototype works well enough, so I could just go back to that with some minor tweaks.
The smaller tubing is from local art supplies thanks to a tip from DC. You can find it online, but it's always nice to be able to look at things. It's fairly inexpensive so I bought a few different sizes. The smaller size comes pretty close to fitting, but is a bit more malleable. I had to crimp the ends of the tubing to get it to fit right, but the larger diameter tubing is also more rigid and frankly just looks a lot more significant.
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