We are humans, not machines, yet we want our creation to be perfect. That’s why I designed a set of jigs and templates to help us make the Floowers perfect. We have 8 jigs in total consisting of 25 parts. And look how colorful and playful they are! Read on to find out how we used them to make your everblooming flower artwork.
Touch Leaf Jig
I already wrote a lot regarding the touch leaf jig in The secret of Making a Perfect Brass Leaf post. Make sure to check it out! This is the most complex one and is used to precisely hold all the brass wires while they are being soldered together to create a nice touch leaf.
Touch Leaf Wires Template
The touch leaf is hand-soldered out of 10 wires of 6 different lengths. Before we had our wire cutter machine I hope I will share it with you in the near future here. We used to cut these wires by hand using this jig. It has 5 different slots for 5 different wires. The last wire does not have to have a precise length so it’s not represented here. But that’s not all! I also use this jig to bend the circumferential wire in half to create a sexy tip of the leaf.
LED Board Glueing Press
LED board is sitting in the center of the blossom and is emitting light through the semi-transparent petals. In the construction of blossom, it’s a major structural element. The board is surrounded by the hexagon with hinges holding the petals. And this special clamp is designed to press the LED board into the hexagon.
Pushrod Soldering Jig
A small and simple jig consisting of 3 parts is actually used twice in the process. First, we use it to make an O-ring with stainless-steel linkages that move with petals. And second, the main pushrod that is going through the stem is being soldered to this O-ring creating a pushrod assembly.
Stem Branching Soldering Jig
That’s the pink one in the middle. I forgot to take a detailed picture of it. We use it to make a branching on the top of the stem. The stem is branched into 6 individual wires supporting the blossom. I put these 6 wires into 6 slots around the jig, fix them with a hexagonal ring and solder them to stem tubing. Again making sure the branching will be flat and even.
Stem Soldering Jig
This one is really important. It ensures the stem will be soldered perfectly perpendicularly and in the perfect center of the blossom. If it would not be the case, the Floower’s blossom would not close evenly and the petals would not overlap. Even a slight misalignment here (0.1 mm) and the blossom start to distort. But to be honest we are not aiming for machine perfect shape of the blossom. After the Floower should represent something natural and nature is not perfect.
LED board is placed on the base and the stem is fixed with the rotating arms in the upper assembly.
Wire Lengths Templates
Two more jigs remain. The light blue and light yellow ones. Those are simple flat templates with slots to cut a wire of the desired length for blossom and stem. Notice they have a small extension on the edge to be able to remove the wire from the slot once it’s cut.
These powerful custom-designed jigs help us to make the Floower a real thing. They seem to be simple yet it took several months to perfect them all.
Do you found this information helpful? Are you now more in love with your Floower knowing how hard it was to design the manufacturing ecosystem and how complicated it’s to make it? Let me know in the comments below!
