How I Made This Glowing Infinity Mirror Out Of Acrylic / DIY

so this is an infinity mirror this is a project I've wanted to do for a long time and the concept of it is you take what I'm gonna call a one-way mirror which is like what you'd find in your bathroom as a coating on the back the other side is reflective and you sandwich lights in between that in a two-way mirror or what I'm gonna call a two-way mirror which is a see-through mirror and I don't know how well that actually picks up on camera but this is a reflective coating that is on this that allows you to see through it one side is more reflective than the other now typically these are made from old picture frames or glass coffee tables I'm actually making mine out of acrylic and I have a very good reason for that one is I want the sides of this frame to be frosted now glass does come in two frosted flavor but it's gonna be difficult for me and most likely expensive to get all these little individual pieces either cut or for me to do it myself and this was supposed to be more of a DIY approach I also wanted this little diamond in the middle to be frosted as well to allow light to spill inside of there so there's a couple different things going on here if you were to use black on the sides here or wood or something you would contain more light and do this the effect would be a bit more bright than it is now this is actually plenty bright enough for what I wanted but it could be brighter if you were to enclose this in something that actually blocked the light from escaping but I wanted the glow because I want this to be able to be used sort of as an accent or even a nightlight so all told this whole project cost about $75 I got everything on Amazon and I will leave affiliate links in the description of this video if you guys want to check out the different things that I actually used for this build now as I said this is all made from acrylic and you can use most woodworking tools with acrylic as long as you follow some basic guidelines now I'm not gonna turn this whole video into how to work with acrylics but if you guys do want me to put out videos on sort of the do's and don'ts of working with acrylics as well as how to bomb them and everything else let me know and I will gladly make those videos I do have a bit of a acrylic fabric background as far as our parts and pieces we need our one-way mirror we need our two-way mirror we need clear acrylic this is all eighth inch we're going to bond the pieces together with this clear double-sided tape this is very thin both this way but also thickness wise and this is what we're gonna use to bond our pieces together this is a three mil tape typically this 8 inch acrylic is 3 mil thick so tape like this should work absolutely perfectly now in my case I don't know if it ever picked up on camera or not but this other piece of clear that I had is a little thinner than that so I probably should have used a thinner tape but this is all I have and the other thing we're gonna need of course is lights I chose to go with RGB lights because I wanted there to be some different color and this one actually comes with a remote which I thought was kind of neat but because I bought this strand separate I didn't I didn't have to do any soldering or anything like that so this is gonna be as DIY as it gets now the first step of course is determined how big you want your frame to be and with infinity mirrors the distance between the back mirror and the front mirror will it will determine how deep the effect is in your project so as you can see when I put the front mir closer to the back mir it gets shallower when I pull it away it makes sort of a deeper effect I chose to go for an inch and a half because I wanted there to be enough so that there's a glow on this particular project and I wanted there to be a little bit of depth to this you're only gonna get so many reflections at least that's what I've noticed camera won't pick it up but I have about 18 LED reflections so that ends up being about 19 rows of lights before they finally disappear each time there's a reflection it loses a little bit of light now what I don't know is maybe if you ran more lights in the frame maybe it would be brighter and you'd see the distant reflections a little bit more but it's still only gonna reflect so many times before it eventually fades which is the look of an infinity mirror it's infinite now for cutting all this acrylic we're gonna use the table saw we're gonna use a triple chip grind tooth geometry is a how you say it tooth geometry anyways you'll notice that every other tooth is flat and every other tooth in between has the corners basically knocked off of it so this is going to give us a decent cut and it's not going to chip out nearly as much as it would be if you used a wood blade or something the other thing is this particular saw blade has 80 teeth so you want more teeth and you want that triple chip grind tooth pattern yeah now if you have a crummy table saw like me and you're cutting eighth inch material eighth inch material can slide under the fence if that is the case for you it's easy to take a nice flat straight board I'm using a piece of old hardwood flooring and use some double side tape and make a sacrificial face to the fence now you should have no problem with clearance underneath there this will provide a much safer experience at the saw cutting acrylic on the table saws is a little bit different than cutting plywood but not by much you just want to make sure that you go slow enough so that you're not tearing the material up but you don't want to go so slow that you're producing heat and melting the material and having a fuse back together on you blade height stays the same about a quarter inch or so above you can raise it up in certain situations a little bit taller just like with wood other than that it cuts the same now if I add my strips cut I would tear the plastic off that's actually one thing I want to say real quick though is acrylic typically comes with either a paper or a plastic protective cover on it keep the cover on as long as you possibly can in the event of a one-sided mirror this coating on the back is actually not protective at all and the front is what's going to have the plastic film on it this will scratch and if you scratch it you'll ruin your mirror that's true for any mirror because this is a coating that's typically sprayed on and so you don't want to scratch that up so run it face down with that coating up if that makes sense just whatever you do just keep the plastic on the plastic at all times now again after removing the protective film from the acrylic I sanded both sides of each strip down with 220 grit sandpaper in a random orbital sander this is going to give me the appearance of frosted which is what I'm looking for you can buy acrylic with the frosted effect that this works just the same and a little bit cheaper now to determine the outside dimensions of my box I actually used the LED strip as a guide I wanted an equal amount of LEDs on each wall and since we're doing a square that means that I could just make one mark and duplicate it over and over so when I figured out the length I made a mark I took another piece of a thin critic and just made another mark on the other side this is gonna make more sense here in just a second I cut those down at the table saw with the same techniques I mentioned in the first part and you guys might notice a little chip out right there you can always make a clean up pass with your table saw afterwards just like you would do a clean up pass with a router and just shave a very small amount off that outside that way the saw blade isn't actually separating two pieces it's actually just almost like sanding down the one side and then I'll get rid of any chips and and marks that you might have got the first time around now this LED strip is a little different than the ones I've worked with in the past and it has this flat little connector so I had to notch that out on the bandsaw to have a space for my wire you'll see what I'm talking about here in just a second now this is where the tape comes into play this is a double-sided clear tape so I'm gonna pull some off the Roll and tape one end of each one of these this is actually the four sides to the little diamond that's inside on my project the easiest way to cut it is with a good sharp blade straight down right into your cutting surface and it should come apart just fine I can't stress sharp blade enough because if you don't use a sharp blade it's going to tear and gum up the tape it's very almost like rubbery and if you don't cut through the plastic film the red part all the way it's also going to pull and tear that protective coating off of there which means anything flying around in the air is going to get attached to your tape before you're ready to use it to assemble I'm going to pull the red protective strip off of the double side tape and I'm actually going to just but each end into the next piece creating a square I'm doing it this way because then all my pieces can be cut to the exact same length and I don't have to do them subtracting and adding depending on which side is the long side on which side is the short side those of you that have ever made a box know what I'm talking about now before I seal the whole thing up I make sure that I put that LED strip inside otherwise I wouldn't have a way of getting it in there if you were running your own tape and soldering a cord in there and you had one of those round cords you could just drill a hole in the side of it and you'd be fine that's how I normally do it this is the first LEDs I've ever had that had the flat little connector on it once I had that sealed up I could go ahead and stick down my LED strip removing a little bit of backing and then sticking them down and chasing that all the way around the frame keeping it in the center of the frame now I chose to do mine on the center of the frame because I wanted symmetry and when you look down this tunnel of sorts I wanted the lights to be equally spaced apart all the reflections if you were to put the LED strip more towards the back of the front what would happen is is as the reflections repeated it would look like two LED strips next to each other as opposed to one in the middle and so you would end up with two a big gap and two and a big gap and I've seen those before they look kind of cool it's just for this I want it as equal lighting and symmetry as I possibly could once I finished installing the LEDs I went ahead and ran more tape all over them the edges of the frame on both sides because this is where our mirrors are gonna stick to I measured the box and cut the mirrors out on the table saw following the same rules because the mirrors were gonna be shown I chose to take some 220 grit sandpaper on a block and sand down the sides so that they were smoother to the touch and they looked a little bit better and we didn't see that saw cut edge cleaning acrylic is a pain in the rear I'm just gonna put that out there ahead of time acrylic scratches very easily so be very careful when you're cleaning it I'm actually not doing this the right way I'm using a little bit of glass cleaner and a paper towel this is actually a really easy way to scratch your acrylic but I was in a time crunch and this is all I really had I did have a microfiber that I would go through and sort of touch up little things here and there in a can of compressed air that'll help keep dust out but just be mindful that acrylic scratches very easily so whatever you use to clean it with be very careful once I had it cleaned up I would fasten the back mirror to the back of the box and flip it over and put the diamond shape in the center of it now my SD card apparently was full when I was filming this and I don't have the footage of it but I'm pretty sure you guys can use your imagination and figure out that I put some VHB tape on the backside of that little diamond and I stuck it to that back mirror and that's how I got that now again I chose to use frosted acrylic for this because I wanted the light to pass through it for more depth and dimension but I actually played around with a few other things including this little plywood star some PVC pipe actually a roll of blue masking tape which all three actually looked kind of cool once I had the back on I could take the film off and give it a quick little cleanup and that's it or done and the only thing you have to do is plug it in and see how well it works I think it looks really cool there's a few things that I would do a little bit different on the next one for one thing acrylic can be a pain in the butt but it's cheap it's easily accessible and we can use it here in the shop if you take your time and you have the patience you can actually make some really cool things out of acrylic I don't like the fact that it can scratch so easy I have plans in the future on making more of these mirrors because I have a lot of really cool ideas and I learned a lot making this one I'm gonna make one where I bend the light a few different directions so that the tunnel looks like it's curving around the corner I can't wait to try that one and I actually want to try doing some scenery where I would put something not lights but a seam in here and that scene once lit would duplicate over and over and it would look like sort of like you're going down a hallway now this came out really nice for a DIY project it's great if I was to do this for a client I would use glue and I would glue the pieces together where I could and route it off and make it a little bit more professional now again like I said you can use black on the outside that'll hold the light in more and brighten up the inside of the frame you could use wood you could I mean you could do whatever you wanted to the possibilities are infinite yeah anyways I think that wraps it up for this guy's have any questions or if I screwed something up and my explanation feel free to leave a comment and let me know otherwise thanks so much for watching this video as always and I will see you guys in the next video oh and happy Thanksgiving happy Thanksgiving

Channel: Inspire Woodcraft

Views: 344,341

Keywords: infinity mirror, how to work with acrylic, illusion mirror, how to make an infinity mirror, how to make an illusion mirror, diy infinity mirror, diy night light, how to make a night light, diy accent light

Id: bKjiuQIVypo

Length: 12min 50sec (770 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 27 2019