collapsing lamp

Ideation

I got the inspiration for this idea for a birthday gift I had gotten for a friend, a folding book lamp. I really like things that can fold and store away in really simple but cool ways. I also have really bright lights in my bedroom and wanted something not as harsh for my apartment next year. 

Design/Protoyping

I wanted my lantern to be centered around these origami bellows I had read about that were being used to deploy solar sails. 

Now that I had a design I needed to come up with a mechanism that would allow the lamp to raise and lift. The main thing I was considering was user ease. Ultimately I thought the simplest thing from a user standpoint would be a scissor jointed lift, the lamp would stay upright by the friction of the joints' bolts against the wood and the user would only have to pull up or push down to adjust the lamp.  I prototyped using chipboard to get a feel of how the joints would work then moved onto wood.

I was very happy with the height I could get out of the joints but quickly realized now that I've cut the base that a.) I need a second set of joints b.) I based the length of the joints off of the point to point distance of the hexagon and not the side to side distance which is shorter. You're probably wondering why I just didn't assemble this in SolidWorks and save myself the heartache, I just didn't ok. 

Assembly

I adjusted the size of the joints and cut out the top and bottom rails so that the joints can slide freely at the mounting points. The lamp was assembled with 1/4-20 hardware, aluminum L-Brackets, and zip ties I used as spacers, all of which I stole.  At this point, the lamp was coming along nicely. It was extremely tilted and wobbly when extended but I knew this could be fixed with some supports going across both scissor joints and decided to move on to the origami. 

The origami was the centerpiece of this lamp and so lots of test pieces were run to measure out our folds to fit the lamp. The first thing I discovered was an inner lip in the hexagon, making the space inside smaller. I remedied this by making my crimps smaller. 

The next step was to scale up to fit the 2-ft wide base. With the given dimensions of the rice paper I had ordered (2 sheets of 38" x 71"). I had just enough to split the lantern into 2 sections each covering 3 sides. (seen in the assembly image). I was now ready to start folding the rice paper. 

A friend and I meticulously marked, scored and pleated the rice paper into 1-inch sections. This was harder than folding the brown paper because the rice paper was much more delicate and could not hold onto crimps. This part only had taken 2 hours and did not come out very nicely. Once we had gotten to the corner folds it was evident that the paper simply was not designed for this. I thought maybe if I cut the paper into 6 sections to go around each side the lamp would at least have a cool pleated effect. This was not the case at all. 

This was all of the paper I had left and it was no longer salvageable. I decided to scratch the idea of a floor lamp and do a table lamp instead, this way I could use printer paper instead and still have the origami incorporated into the lamp. I quickly scaled everything down, recut and assembled in an irresponsibly short time before class. (DXF files attached below)

Final 

The final mini lamp was 1-foot point-to-point and could go from ~1 ft to ~2 ft. It also incorporated the origami bellow pattern I had in mind from the beginning. If I were to do this project again I would not use paper but a fabric so that I can sew the folds instead.  I would also use more glues instead of fasteners to reduce the bulk of the lamp and give it a cleaner, sturdier construction.