This candelabra is a great project combining 21st century crafts with art to produce a stunning, ivy covered tree structure, which is bound to get people talking. It is surprisingly easy to make, but you do need to do some electrical work and may have to do some soldering. The Funky LED candelabra would make a great technology project for school.
At the base of the structure, the wire 'legs' are splayed out like the spokes of an umbrella. Make a small 90-degree turn at the end of each 'leg' to create a 'foot' (pointing down)Leave until the glue is completely dry and then remove all the pieces of selotape.Cut out assorted sizes of ivy leaves from thin card. You will need 20 or 30 leaves in all. Use a needle to make a hole in each leaf where the stalk would be. Spray paint both sides of the ivy leaves silver and leave to dry.8 of the LED lights will be situated at the ends of each ranch and the remaining two should be nestled from where the branches sprout.Take the marked ends of wire and twist them together in groups of 3 or 4 ends, and push the 3 groups into the first 3 spaces of an electrical chocolate block. Screw them in. Do a similar thing with the unmarked wires, pushing them into spaces 4,5 and 6 on the chocolate block on the same side as the marked wires. Screw them all in firmly.Attach an LED bulb to each of the pairs of wires. You can solder the connections or twist them together if you have dismantled LED lights from the '99p Store'. If you twist the wires together you will need to wrap the join in insulation tape.Cut and straighten out the coat hangers and re-model them to form 'C' shapes. Use two cable ties to hold the coat hangers together, forming a trunk.Most customers look at particle distribution, so that's a standard item for the lab review. In-house software assesses some 45,000 particles, checking width, length, diameter and so on. Every tank is sampled multiple times; then a chemical analysis is performed to ensure the barrel is satisfactory. All electronics grade solder is made from virgin metal. Reclaimed material is reserved for industrial use only.The ISO 9001 registered, ISO 17025 compliant Quality Assurance lab is bright and clean, with a new Thermo Fisher Quant x-ray and a Thermo Electron 3460 metals analyzer, among other gear. AIM performs arc-spark testing to check for all standard impurities, with tests run to IPC specifications and multiple others. More than 1,000 samples per month are analyzed. Montreal is one of three company labs; others are in China and Mexico.R&D is performed in Montreal, Rhode Island and China, while tech support centers are based in India, Singapore, Philippines, Mexico, North America, Europe and China. In Montreal, AIM maintains separate labs for various types of paste, cored wire and testing, and each chemist has their own specialty. (Similar labs are set up in Mexico and China.) AIM also provides adhesives, but they are not big sellers.From there, we walk past several drums of butyl carbide to the lab where AIM makes its paste medium. Using dedicated mixers for water-soluble, cored wire and no-clean, operators weigh the bucket to get the precise weight; even a slight deviation could ruin a batch. The powder press is truly impressive: Molten metal pours into a dish; solder falls into the chamber, then onto a screen, then to the atomizer. It's a three-story process. An oxide "skin" forms; a thin skin is needed on every layer. Powder is exposed to atmosphere for about one hour, then vacuum packed with gas and labeled. Yields are about 70%, very high for electronics grade solders. Paste is made in a 45% RH dry room. Each lot is tested for corrosion, electromigration, thermal cycling and SIR, among others. "Everything has to be tested," Seelig notes. While AIM is a leading supplier of bar solder, many would be surprised at the volume of its paste business. Combined, the total revenues from the two segments easily place AIM among the five largest electronics solder suppliers in the world. "The ratio of bar to paste is lower than five years ago. The industry doesn't realize how much we do in paste. Maybe it goes with our understated personalities," deadpans Black.Over the past 10 years, supplying solder has been a tricky business. The RoHS Directive permanently rerouted the industry direction, causing a disruption in pricing that is felt to this day. Solder is, of course, one of the lower items on the bill of materials totem pole. Unlike most raw material prices, precious metals are in a sustained period of inflation. Despite this - because of it, in fact - solder vendors do not capitalize. Indeed, most find the higher metal prices make their market more treacherous: Customers sometimes balk at paying more; vendors pay cash for raw metal, and it may take 100 days or more to turn that metal into solder and get paid by a customer, so the higher raw metal prices increase the supplier's risk and cost of doing business; the cost to reclaim dross increases.With 12 sites up and running, AIM doesn't see an end yet in sight. Black says he's "almost convinced" more facilities will be erected, although he doesn't yet know where. "It also depends on what the market wants to consume," Seelig adds, pointing to the logistics of the supply chain. "We can't ship alcohol-based or water-based flux or bar solder via air freight."The liquid flux is made in an explosion-free room. All flux chemistry is designed and made in Montreal. (Chemistry is the main expense in R&D; the cost to develop an alloy is relatively low. Changing it, however, is a long, drawn-out process, Selig allows.) We also see a small SMT epoxy room with a mill for different pigments.We pass the metal castings area, where three continuous casters labor in a humidity- and temperature-controlled room pressurized for fume extraction.AIM uses standard blenders with automatic controls designed to be programmed, but that cannot be adjusted by operators. All paste is made to order, and alloys and formulas tend to be the outgrowth of face-to-face discussions between Seelig and AIM's marketing staff with OEMs and EMS firms. Inventories are kept low, with a few emergency stocks of common types.The Montreal headquarters is situated on a massive campus that stretches more than two miles from front to back, where a set of rail sidings slides right up to the door. While Montreal is considered home to the company's extensive bar, wire and solder paste operations, AIM also maintains mixing and blending operations in the US and Hong Kong.If you're looking for more sound from your drums in larger venues, CAD Audio offers affordable drum mike solutions. The Stage 4 features an updated D12 kick drum microphone with extended low end response, two D29 dynamic mikes, and D19 snare mikes featuring integrated clips for easy, unobtrusive mounting. The Stage 7 adds an additional tom mike, plus two C9 pencil condenser for overhead, high hat, or cymbals. The Tour 7 features upgraded TSM411 tom and GXL1200 overhead condenser mikes. All three kits feature a handy vinyl carrying case.Heading up the technology side is Karl Seelig, a 30-year veteran of electronics materials. Seelig came aboard in 1988 to help launch the electronics solders business. His imprint on the company's solder product lines can be seen everywhere, from the formulations to the equipment used to make the powders.FROM JOE TO PROAttack the leaves to the structure by threading the leaves individually on a short piece of craft wire, then bend the wire around the network of wires on the tree and twist the craft wire ends together to secure the leaf. Use the largest leaves at the bottom, gradually getting smaller further up the candelabra. Also, make sure that the bottom most leaves hide the battery compartment and chocolate block.If you can put a pair of eyeglasses back together with a mini screwdriver, you can easily change your pickups. The Liberator, once installed in your guitar by a professional tech, allows you to swap out your pickups without a soldering iron-the color-coded pickup leads are solidly clamped in place with mini screws.Option 2 - You could use these electrical parts from the 99p store lights to keep the costs down. This would also mean that you wouldn't need to solder, you could just twist wires together and wrap in insulation tape.Using craft wire, make interesting twisty bits to decorate the candelabra�s branches. To make 'springs', wrap a length of wire around a pencil. To fix the wire in place, anchor it down by wrapping the end of the wire around the coat hangers forming the trunk. The wrapping around the trunk adds to the support of the structure when the cable ties are taken away.Within an hour, the room falls quiet again as the staff resumes its roles inside the vast manufacturing facility that doubles as the global headquarters of AIM.Option 1 - There are a couple of options with the lights themselves. The '99p Store' sell 20 mini battery operated LED lights. You could use these lights as they are and have lights along the branches wherever the bulbs happen to be.Strip a small portion of its plastic covering, from the two wires on the battery compartment, as if you were getting ready to join the wires. Mark one of the wires with a small piece of electrical tape.
There you have made a stunning candelabra, which is bound to be a talking point wherever you place it.
Author: S. Roberts
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