Albert Hwang

This is an update on the progress of the mirage. Enjoy:

This past week or so I’ve been consumed in building this thing… here’s a little update as to how everything is coming together:

Here are two images of the top of the mirage. It’s a container completely built with 3/8″ Acrylite (basically Plexiglas, just a different company). It’s two by three feet, with 6 inch tall sides. The joints are (hopefully) waterproof, and the main sheet of Acrylite has 128 holes laser cut into it. Here’s a closeup of the holes:

The sooty black marks, I think, are burn marks from the laser cutter. Cool, no?

The plan is that this structure will be elevated by these four booms:

*Sorry about the image quality there – this photo was taken in the poor lighting conditions of my basement, so I had to Photoshop it the best I could. What you’re looking at is four clear tubes being glued down to circles of Acrylite. The chairs and metal rods taped to the Acrylite rods are there to keep everything in place while the glue dries. Here’s a closeup image:

And what’s the plan for the falling water? I was going to build another Acrylite structure to catch all the water falling through those holes, but that turned out to be way too expensive. So, instead of hours of work on needlessly gluing and waterproofing expensive plexi, I swung by Target and bought myself a kiddie pool:

Word… Word… When I was blowing this thing up in my living room, I realized that this is a hazardously large amount of water. I had planned on doing all this in the studio on the second floor, but imagine the mess this thing would cause if it started leaking. This is why operations have moved to the basement. I think it’s a true mark of geekdom when your work forces you to work in the basement.

The water pump is in the mail, and should be arriving soon. It is a Fountain Tech FT-1300 from Fountain Mountain. I need a few more pieces of plastic from Canal Plastics to mount the top piece to the legs. Apart from that, I’m ready to roll.

A while back, I made a prototype idea for something called the mirage. The mirage is a Wiremap, where the wires are replaced with streams of water. When I came up with it, I imagined it would be ten feet tall – the size of a small room, so that people could dance in it.

I decided instead to start small and work my way up. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks playing around with plastics – plexiglass, specifically. Fortunately, over in Chinatown, there’s this awesome little shop known as the Canal Plastics Center. They sell everything you’d ever need. They also custom build your designs, as well as provide a high precision laser cutting service.

At first, I was excited to just by the raw material and do all the work myself. But after all the testing, it turns out that I have neither the tools nor the knowledge to actually accomplish what I want to accomplish. I tried to drill holes with a drill gun, but they’re never perfectly perpendicular – I tried to joint two pieces together, but the jig saw cuts I made can’t really compare to their table saw cuts.

I sent off an email earlier today for a quote for a test hunk of plastic. I wanna see how well these cuts can perform.