Project 4 - COMPLETION

14 hours... seriously!? I spent 14 hours on Thursday working on this piece. The good news is that, regardless of no one but Marshall showing up during the day to help out, I think we'll finish on time... or close.

I spent most of the day wiring the 19 individual LED lights, running the wiring behind the base-board and securing the LED's inside the individual boxes at the correct angle to properly illuminate each image. I was faily proud of myself for finding the LED's at an amazing price. Purchased individually from Radio Shack, they were over $2.00 each. I took some advice from Erin and did some shopping at Harbor Freight Tools. I scored a 27-LED light for $3.99. That's approximately $0.15 per LED! I'm loving China right now. All I needed to do was take the light apart, desolder and extract each LED... awesome.





Our biggest problem surfaced when figuring out a way to secure the individual boxes to the base-board. The 1/8" MDF that the boxes are constructed of would be near impossible to get from the back of the base-board with the pneumatic nailer, so we tried a variety of glues. This was by far the most frustrating part of the entire process. After trying a few different glues, waiting for them to dry, then watching the boxes fall off as we lifted the base-board vertical brought a mixture of anger and frustration. We were running out of time. Finally we found a 5 minute epoxy compound in the sculpture studio that did the trick.

Needless to say we didn't finish by class time, but by a superfluous outpouring of grace from Erin our installation date was extended. The rest of the group (with the exception of Allen) showed up to finish painting. Even Jane and Jenae, who weren't part of our group volunteered to paint.



Saturday Marshall and I met up, grabbed a couple of students on campus and moved he sucker to PAW 112. I thought my arms were going to fall off half way across campus. My only motivation to keep going was that so many hours of my life had been sucked away by this project there was no way in hell I was going to drop it now.

It was almost surreal to see it finished and installed. This was a beast of a project, and while there were things about it that I wish would have turned out differently it was, overall, a great experience.