I made this back in 2012 and never wrote it up. Mind you, I’m still in two minds as to whether it works well. If you know it’s an Aperture Science logo it looks like one, but I think otherwise it just looks like a camera iris / aperture / spiral thing. Since making this I bought some mirrored glass which might have been better in the middle, as actually I don’t really open the curtains too much – it lets out heat in winter, and lets in sun on my monitor in summer! A mirrored centre would allow me to hang it on a wall. Maybe I’ll look for some adhering foil backing…
Anyway, the design is fairly obvious, two circles, with the inner one flattened to an octagon and the octagonal axes extended to the outer circle. I bought a big sheet of this grey marbled glass for another project (which I have almost finished so will write up soon). I tried using a thicker 1/4 copper foil to make the bolder strokes of the Aperture Science logo but I think it would need to be even thicker.
The main lessons I learnt were:
- Tracing designs onto opaque glass is hard when you can’t see paper template underneath the glass. I need a light box (no w sorted).
- Grinding circles is hard.
- Think what you’re going to do with it once you’ve made it. Turns out I don’t really like hanging them in the window.