Candelabra
(Click thumbnail above to see larger image.)
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Assignment for DAI310 (Product Design 1), taken in Spring 2008 at SFSU. The objective of this assignment was design and fabricate a candelabra using a maximum of 64 square inches (4″ x 16″ or 6″ x 10.6″) of 22g steel/copper/aluminum sheet. Other materials (such as fasteners, wire, tubing) could be used as long as they didn’t dominatine the design. I wanted to play around with the idea of encapsulating the flame, which I felt to be the focal point of any (burning) candle; with this in mind, I constructed the following prototype out of posterboard:
This was too large in scale, so I doubled the width and halved the lengths of the strips used to build the sphere, as seen below:
The scale now seemed appropriate, but something was still missing. To balance out the overall form, I decided to mirror the legs on the top, both to make the candelabra multi-modal as well as to move away from the vaguely Sputnik aesthetic. (Note: rounding of the bottom legs was done at a later date.)
Satisfied with the overall form, I made a prototype out of galvanized steel:
However, after constructing the galvanized steel prototype, it became apparent that one set of legs was oriented incorrectly. This was only noticeable from certain angles, where the candelabra would appear to be more heavy on one side than another (see the second image above). Since the main sphere was constructed out of three interlocking loops, I needed to make sure when a leg was mounted to a loop, that its counterpart on the other side of the loop was parallel with respect to planes but pointed in the opposite direction (instead of being parallel but perpendicular in direction). On top of that, the squared-off legs didn’t complement the lines of the rest of the form, so I decided to try rounding off the load-bearing corners, and tested this on the posterboard prototype shown above. The final template was then prepared in Illustrator:
The finished result is shown at the top of this page.