Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “How To Make Giant DIY Moon Wall Art – no power tools, under $100”.
Even the most jaded space nerd will stop to admire the beauty of a full moon. I wanted to bring that beauty into my home and i’m going to show you how you can do it too. When i decided to make this project, i had a few key goals in mind. I didn’t want to use crazy fancy tools that people didn’t always have access to no 3d printers, no laser cutters, no giant cnc mills. I wanted this to be as simple as possible to reproduce the only tools that you need to create.
One of these giant wall hanging moons, will be a hacksaw or pool saw a pair of scissors and a staple gun. That’S it to create this. I needed a giant image of the moon that i could backlight. I looked around online for them and i called around to some print shops to see what it would cost to get this printed on some kind of a translucent plastic that i could backlight and it was going to be over 200 dollars just for a high resolution.
Large image and then i found you could buy shower curtains with pictures on them of the moon. I ordered a couple and compared them to see which one would work best for this, and ultimately i decided to go for the bigger one, even though the image was slightly skewed. Another goal that i had in mind is that i wanted this to be extremely low profile. I didn’t want it to stick out from the wall. Much at all. My goal was one inch from the wall, so one knuckles width away from the wall and i actually pulled it off now for the frame i could have used my giant cnc router to cut some wood.
You know some half inch plywood or something like that and been done with it. But again i wanted to make this as accessible as possible. Basically, what i ended up doing was making a hulu out of pex tubing. I just bought a bunch of pex tubing, measured out the right size of a circle to go around my moon and cut it to length to join the two pieces together. I just cut an additional little piece of pex: tubing removed, a slice out of the middle so that it could fit inside and here’s a quick tip if you throw it in some hot water. That makes it a little bit easier to work now. This is plumbing tubing, so it doesn’t really have a whole lot of an effect on it because it’s meant to hold water, but it does help it relax a little bit.
You throw it in some hot water and then you slide it into the end and put the two pieces in place. If you really want to hold it there, you can use an assortment of glues. E6000 is typically a good glue for stuff.
Like that i didn’t bother, i knew that with the material stretched over it, it was going to stay in shape. Now, when i did all of my pex tubing together, it didn’t lay perfectly flat, and i found that i had to leave it laying out in the sun for a while in my yard, for it to kind of relax into a flat shape. And ultimately, it was never perfectly flat. I used pex hose mounts to hold it to my wall flat after i had the hula hoop shape created.
I just went around and stretched a combination of the moon shower curtain and another vinyl shower curtain that was frosted to act as a light diffuser. I stretched that over the giant, hula hoop and stapled it in place. Initially, i was using these little clips that i made out of pex tubing so that i could snap them over and hold it into place, but ultimately, after thinking about it, i realized i didn’t need these and they just kind of looked cruddy from the outside. So i popped them all off and just stapled it all in place.
That’S really all you have to do is work. Your way around go opposite sides to help avoid things getting pulled too much to one side and staple it in place. Cut the extra material off with a pair of scissors and you’re almost done. You can hang it on the wall that way, and it would already look beautiful now i wanted mine lit up, so i ordered a strip of led lighting and just used the adhesive backing on the led lighting to adhere it to the inside of the giant pex And that gave me this effect now there are a few further steps you could take to improve this project.
There are some things, i’m not quite happy with and some areas where you could just go nuts to add some technology to take it a step. Further. One area that i’m not real happy with is the light the color of the light. What i used was an rgb led strip, you can change colors, but that means the white is actually a combination of the three uh leds, the red green and the blue leds.
All on at once, and as you can see, this is white. It’S pretty blue! If i were to redo this, i might just order cool white or warm white leds to get that just solid white color. Another thing that would have been nice would have been to have solid lighting over the entire back, and i experimented with this. I laid down my leds in a few different patterns. I experimented with how far i would have to move things around extra diffusion, and what i found was that i would have to sacrifice that extremely thin profile in order to get a fully diffused light.
I think i measured it like four inches or so. If i used an additional diffusing shower curtain that i would get nice even light, so it would stick out from the wall about this far, which would have been okay, but it’s not what i wanted. So i left it like this now to take things a step.
Further, if you really wanted to make this thing pop with some cool tech, you could plug in an arduino and detect the moon phase to light up different sections of this to line up with the phases of the moon. I decided ultimately not to do that, because i want a full moon. All the time. Tell me in the comments below what ideas you have for how i could possibly diffuse this light better and maintain that one inch profile, i’d love to get this kind of more evenly lit all the way across.
But i don’t want to make it stick out from the wall. A few more inches be sure to give us a big thumbs up on this video and subscribe to this website for more cool projects. You .