Last week was fun playing with one small marble tile… so these last days I decided to get to the next level and buy a 60x60cm Carrara marble tile as I finalised the design of my lamps on the sketchbook. To get started I divided the surface with tape in 9 square of 210x20cm each one. This allowed myself and the technician to have a guidance when we cut the tile with the diamond saw. During the process, we also had to make sure that the marble was wet so that it didn’t break while cutting it.

Out of the 9 square marble tiles I got, I only kept the best 4 and left the others for testing as for the second phase of this process I had to drill a hole in the centre of each tile. It was quite a complex thing to do and it required me to buy some additional equipment: Diamond Tip Hole Cutter. I basically needed to place some plasticine around the area of the tile where I wanted to drill the hole in order to put some water inside to keep the surface wet. Before I applied this technique to the four tiles I selected before, I tried to drill some holes in one with broken corners. This allowed me to perfection my ability to hold the drill vertically, perfectly perpendicular.

To make sure I was drilling exactly in the centre of the tile I built another wooden square with the same dimensions of the marble with a hole in the centre. This made the process much more precise and accurate. I also had to repeat the process I used last week to polish the sides of my tiles to make them as shiny as the top surface. At the end, I was really pleased with the result.

The next thing I did was to test with cardboard the dimensions of the cylinder I wanted to build which is supposed to work as a bridge between the tile and the wall.

This also allowed me to test the effect of the LED lights directly on the wall. With the room completely dark the effect was really awesome! After this, I knew I was going in the right direction…

At this point, I started to build the four wooden cylinders using different machines to drill holes, to make them perfectly rounded and to cut off the part in excess.

One of the other things I did this week was to create a hemisphere in copper as the final touch to cover the hole in the centre of the marble tile. To do that I used the workshop in the jewellery department. First of all, I got a sheet of copper, drew a circle of the dimensions of the diameter + height of the hemisphere and used a piercing saw to cut out the shape required.

Now in order to be able to turn the sheet of copper into a hemisphere, I had to bring this material to an extremely high temperature using a torch. After that, I laid the copper disk over the shallow dimple and bang on it with the hammer. When I reached the bottom, the shape of the hemisphere was pretty close to the perfection.

All I needed to do now was to polish this sphere and test it on the marble to see how it looked. When I was doing this processed I also tried to make different shapes and different sizes of objects to see which one looked the best. You can clearly that there is only one winner…

During the weekend I also took some test photos for the DJCAD catalogue… I’m not really happy with the result, but it was a good practice for my next photoshoot which I have scheduled for next week.