Outcome

My idea was to create a lamp that used natural elements like wood and had an aesthetic that resembled Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture. I wanted to have the light in the lamp be diffused and almost "pour" out of the wood. 

I started by creating a pattern that I would then cut into 1/8" thick plywood. I tiled this simple geometric pattern over each of the four pieces that would make up the lamp's sides. Once that was done, I started laser cutting the pattern into the pieces of wood. This is where I ran into my first unanticipated issue  — the laser cutting process took much much longer than I expected it to. Each side of the lamp took about 2 hours and I had not scheduled enough time for it.

I tried multiple settings on the laser cutter as I wanted to build the lamp from 1/4" thickness plywood. In the end, I couldn't figure out a setting that would produce the results I liked, so I ended up using 1/8". Looking back, I am glad that I made this decision as the 1/4" plywood might have made the lamp a bit too heavy.

About 10 hours later, when I finally had my pieces laser cut, I started the process to build my lamp. This was the fun part. I got to stain the wood and I had never done this before. I really liked the color that the stain imparted on the wood and I was excited about the end result. I had decided to used transparent acrylic without removing the protective film as I found that this diffused the light pretty well. The acrylic also added rigidity to the structure which helped make it feel more solid.

Once I had stained the wood, and let it dry, it was time to assemble the lamp together. This is where I ran into another unanticipated problem — it turns out that the dimensions of the pieces of plywood are not accurate and the manufacturers take liberty with the sizes. I had painstakingly calculated the dimensions with the assumption that all the dimensions of the raw materials would be accurate.

As a result, when I started gluing the pieces of the plywood together, I found that the parts did not align very well. I also should have used finger joints on the box instead of gluing the pieces together. Gluing was a hard task and took me quite a while to get right. This issue combined with the inaccurate dimensions only exacerbated the pain further.