Kaleidoscope

[Dave Bagwill]

Has anyone here made one? I've always loved them and would like to make some out of nice wood. A printed instructable would be wonderful.

[Herman]

So many views, so few replies. That is sad. So I help you:
I have no clue!
Herman

[Dave Bagwill]

Thank you Herman, for that thoughtful but worthless reply. LOL.

[Kevin in California]

I started to look for some plans and got distracted looking at Kaleidscopes. :)

[John Parchem]

I never made one but have had a few handmade ones. I do not think you need plans. Basically you need a tube. I suppose you could roll up some veneer.

You need three mirrors cut just short of the length of the tube maybe an inch or so short. The width of the mirrors need to be less than the diameter such that when you put them in the tube you will have an equilateral triangle with the mirrors facing each other. You probably need to play with the width to make it work.

you can stuff stuff on in the non mirror side to push them together.

On the side of the tube where the mirror are close cap it and put a very small hole in the center of the cap to look through.

On the other end you are going to need 2 clear plastic or class lens. One gets pushed to mirrors, fill the cavity on the end with colorful stuff close of the end with the other lens.

You have a basic Kaleidscope.

you can make it out of a card board tube to play around with.

[Dave Bagwill]

Does Gore have a book on this? :-)

Thanks John - I've also seen a couple of methods on the net now, looks like a basic one would get done quickly.

[Jay McClellan]

Once upon a time I made a kaleidoscope for my wife, and it turned out pretty well. That was nearly 30 years ago (we celebrate our 30th anniversary later this month) and until now it never occurred to me to try taking a photo looking through it. I made it way back in the olden days of film after all! I was able to capture a short video showing how it looks, not great quality since I was hand-holding both the kaleidoscope and my digital camera but this should give you an idea of how it looks when looking through it.




To make it I cut 3 strips of ordinary glass mirror 12" long and about 3/4" wide. One could get a little cleaner reflection at the corners with first-surface mirror (with the silver on the top side) and I think many high-end kaleidoscopes are made that way but the first-surface mirror is pricey and easily damaged. I think I just cut the strips from a 12x12 mirror tile from a home center, nothing special but it's fairly thin glass and that helps avoid any odd effects at the corners where they meet. Really it worked just fine. I somehow held the 3 strips together into a triangular tube (shiny side in, duh), probably used tape or something to hold them temporarily, and then I used a hot-melt glue gun to run a bead along the outside of the corner seams. It made a really sturdy tube and the corners fit well. We were in college at the time so didn't have a wood shop or many tools but I managed to fit the triangular mirror tube inside a body made of soup cans. Yes, soup cans! I drilled a 3/8" hole in one can-end to look through, and cut a ~3/4" triangular opening in the other can-end where the light would enter. I wrapped the whole thing in black electrical tape, not quite elegant but it was sturdy and looked okay. Here's the best part - to make changing patterns I smashed up some glass marbles. This was surprisingly hard (and a tad dangerous) to do but with a big enough hammer they will break. I cut some soup-can-size circles of glass and drilled a 1/8" hole through the center of each with a carbide glass drill (we had a lot of hobbies even back then), and fit them into part of a soup can with the edges crimped over and the smashed marbles inside. The result was a cylinder about 1/2" long and the diameter of a soup can, with glass ends and 1/2" holes in the center of each end. I had glued a threaded nut inside one end of the body, so I could attach the rotating cylinder to the body with a small screw passing through the glass disks and threaded into the nut. The patterns are really nice and always changing as the crushed marbles tumbled around in the cylinder. One of the glass disks eventually cracked, probably because I didn't have the 1/8" holes perfectly centered or maybe because the screw was too tight, but it didn't really hurt anything. Here's what the business end looks like:



I hope this gives you some ideas. The strips of mirror tile were cheap, easy, and worked great. The soup cans and electrical tape, well not so elegant so I'm sure you can come up with something nicer looking. The crushed marbles look nice but instead of trying to smash up marbles I'd suggest stained glass scraps or even broken colored glassware, maybe bits of depression glass or whatever. It would be easy to make several interchangeable end pieces with different kinds of pattern material, which was my original thought but I never made any others. For drilling holes in glass absolutely get a diamond drill, don't mess with the carbide kind as it's really hard to avoid breakage (I think I broke several before getting two whole ones), and the diamond bits are fairly cheap these days.