6/22/2022

The HR lady at my work is Amazing. This last winter i gave her a giant light up snowflake. She loved it so much, but recently she said that the snowflake is out of season, she needs something summery to brighten up the office, and she joked that she needs a boat. No joke to me Dragana, Let’s get you a boat.

Lately I’ve been inspired by bright neon colors, vintage 80s styles, and Miami beach summer vibes. Even Though she wanted a boat, i still played with some other summer themed designs.

I ordered a custom acrylic lens that is shaped to the exact boat I drew. I would later install LEDs into this lens to make the boat light up and glow like neon.

As i was waiting for parts to arrive, i was imagining how she would display this light. Its not a great shape to stand up on its own, maybe it can lean against a wall. But also there will need to be wires, and i planned on making it color changing which would need a control box.

Maybe I can also create some kind of pedestal to display the boat and hide the wires and controls as well. I decided I can 3D print a stand that looks like ocean waves. I was not up for the challenge of modeling it myself, so I had to use what I could find on the internet, and shared for free by the creators. I found “The Perfect Wave” on thingiverse and thought it was perfect. I love how perfectly a little surfer guy figurine would fit in as well.

Wave as downloaded
Wave after scaling
As downloaded, the wave was comically small compared to the boat. I had to scale and stretch it to fit the boat. It is still disproportionately small compared the boat, but my printer couldn’t print any bigger.

The next step was to figure out how much shtuff i would need to hide inside of this wave. Basically, some wires, the color change controller, and the power supply. I decided to mount the power supply remotely, this way I would only have to hide the incoming wire instead of the whole power supply.

Seeing where they will fit
After cutting out a cavity to hide shtuff
Red is a slightly larger version of the controller and wires needed to hide. Blue is the Wave itself

Finally, I cut a little slot into the barrel of the wave so that the lens would fit nice and snuggly. Now it was time to Print. The Estimate was 19 hours. I wanted to just print it and be done so i slowed it down to about 80% to ensure it came out well.

He helped by alerting my when the filament ran out
Progress pictures of the Print

The Print turned out OK. Not amazing, but it will work fine.

The controls and boat both fit great.

I liked how everything was turning out, but I knew I needed to paint or do something about the plain blue wave. Well, its supposed to be a crashing wave, so the crashing part should be more white and foamy than blue. That’s when I got the idea to try and spray paint it, while also spraying water on it to see if I could create a more water like effect.

I tried to mask off anything I didn’t want painted
I think the water effect worked out well. It made it look bubbly and foamy like a real crashing wave!

Everything fit and looks good, Just a single paired wire is all that is seen, all else is hidden

This is the custom color “Adriatic Sea” that the HR lady said she likes.
Here is a video of the colors changing.