Welcome back
Thanks for joining me today on the King Of Random
Recently I saw a product that looked like a stone archway with a hallway
Extending behind it as far as the eye could see
It was an illusion set up using a couple of mirrors and some lights to make it look like the hallway
extended far beyond the actual dimensions of the product
I thought it was a really cool idea and I wanted to build my own so the purpose of today's video is to show you
How I'm going to build my own infinity mirror using a few easily available products the primary supplies
We'll need for this project are a mirror and a piece of glass
Approximately the same size as each other some styrofoam a couple of lights and some window tinting the other supplies
I have around our equipment for building and decorating my infinity mirror
This mirror was originally a baseplate designed to put candles on to decorate your home
I picked it up at a craft store for around five bucks
If you have a store near you that sells glass and will cut it for you to a custom size you can often get that
For fairly cheap if that's not available you can often pick up a picture frame with a glass front. We're pretty cheap
I have the white styrofoam from Lowe's. It's a one-inch sheet of expanded polystyrene
This actually comes in a 4-foot by 8-foot, sheet, but that didn't fit in my car
So I had to cut it down into smaller sizes
Which worked just fine for this project
These battery-powered tea lights can often be found in any home decor section of a store
And I like these ones because they flicker mimicking a real flame the window tinting I picked up at an autoparts supply store this particular
Film blocks 35% of light you can go as high as 50%
But you don't want to go any darker than that or it'll be too hard to see through the front window of your infinity mirror
before we do anything else with a styrofoam on both sides it has a
Plastic coating we want to peel that off
So we have the raw foam because I cut this foam to fit into my car a lot of the edges aren't straight
So I'm using my glass as a square to line up a new 90 degree angle
I've got foam to cut, so I'm gonna be using our styro-slicer' that we've shown you in a few other videos
If you haven't yet gotten around to building yourself a styro-slicer' don't worry most of what we're building today
Can be done with just a razor blade the first thing we need to do is set up our mirror and our pane of glass
Perfectly parallel to each other a few inches apart to start. I'll cut out a large piece of styrofoam to use as our base
I'll start with a base
That's a little wider than it needs to be and I'll cut off some extra later, but to start off
I'm going to take about three inches on either side of the mirror
Now that we've got our bass, let's measure out two lines that we will carve down to become slots
Which will hold the mirror and the glass in place?
You'll have to decide how far apart you want your mirror and your pane of glass to be if they're closer together the repeating light
Effect will also be closer together farther apart the lighting will look more normal, but the effect will be a little bit diminished
I like to leave about 3 inches of space
With our lines measured out we now need to cut grooves about halfway down into the foam. I'm going to use this handsaw
You want to be sure that the saw is perfectly perpendicular to the poem so that your slots are straight up and down with
The slots the way, we've cut them our pane of glass will fit into the slots
But our mirror is a little bit thicker so we need to widen that slot so it fits well to
widen the slot for the mirror
Let's just take a piece of sandpaper and wrap it around a popsicle stick and run it through the groove
We need to make sure that our mirror and our glass stay perfectly parallel to each other
so let's make another piece of foam that will go on top of the two and hold them straight up and down this piece of
Foam, I want to be about one inch narrower on both sides of the glass
this piece of foam in the end will be entirely covered up by the decorative parts of the infinity mirror it needs to hold the
Pane of glass in the mirror in place, but it doesn't need to be as extensive as the bases
The grooves that will hold the mirror and the glass on our base are three inches apart
So if there are three inches apart on the top as well the two planes should be perfectly parallel
Now because my pane of glass is a little bit smaller than my mirror my one inch thickness of foam is actually not thick enough
To build a cap on top of this
So I'm going to cut another piece identical to this one
Slice it on the lines that I've marked and then glue it all together to make a piece that will hold our pane of glass
And our mirror steady
That should hold our two pieces pretty well
Gluing styrofoam together can be tricky some kinds of glue will dissolve or melt your styrofoam
What I'm going to be using today is a very low heat glue gun. It's cool enough that the glue
Shouldn't melt the styrofoam at all feels like you're working pretty well
Trying to leave just enough room that the pane of glass will fit nicely of course on this side
I need to leave enough room for the slightly wider mirror just
To reinforce the glue on putting a strip on the outside here as well
Our styrofoam cap lines up pretty well with our two panes of glass
But it's still having a little bit of a hard time fitting nicely onto the mirror so to make it conform
Even more perfectly to the shape, I'm going to use a piece of sandpaper on top of the mirror and carve it down like that
We've got our base and our cap piece
Which are holding our mirror and our pane of glass perfectly?
Parallel to each other so now it's time to start adding some more pieces to make this a little more decorative the first piece
I'll add will act as a sort of facade
I'm going for sort of a castle theme on this
Infinity mirror so what I want is a piece that comes up on the sides and just makes a nice face for the whole thing
On this calf you can see one of the pieces of styrofoam sticks out a little bit farther than the top piece of styrofoam
So I'm going to trim it down so the two are flush to make this facade
I'm actually going to cut three pieces of styrofoam
One for each side and one that will go across the top I'll start by cutting a two inch wide strip from this styrofoam
Next I'll measure the height so it comes up to the same place as the top of the cap
We will want our side pieces to overlap the glass a little bit, so let's use our hand saw and cut some more grooves
Looking good so far. Let's add a few more details with the cat piece and the two side supports added
I'm going to make a single facade piece that will raise up higher than the level of our cap
This area here is where we'll be able to see the glass so this part of the styrofoam will be removed and the rest of
It will stay
There we go that looks pretty good now
I want to add a curved archway
So I'm going to trace out our facade and figure out a good shape that will fit entirely on it
I don't want the archway to be quite as wide as the facade and I'm going to have it come in just a little bit
I'm gonna make that a little bit larger because I do want it to extend beyond the corners here
All right, I'm gonna give this a rough cut with the razor blade, and then I'll go around all the detail edges with the styro-slicer'
Beautiful leave that it will turn into a fantastic stone archway our decorative pieces are coming along nicely now
I'm going to add a strip across the back of the cap and another piece that goes on top of the whole thing
Let's measure how high we need that strip to be
Now let's measure a piece that goes on top of the beam
We just added and our facade act as a cap on top of the whole thing
I do want it to extend about an inch ahead of the facade
This line represents the front of the facade, so I'm going to extend it about one inch beyond there
While I measure this cat piece that was going on top
And then I decided I actually wanted to extend about an inch off to the sides as well
So I'm going to trace this out onto another piece of styrofoam. Just adding a couple inches to the width new piece
Cut I like that fit a lot better with it extending off of the sides as well as the front
I want to start gluing things together, so it's more structurally sound as I finish it up, but before I do that
There's a few more decorative elements. I need to add to these pieces
The structural and the decorative pieces are both ready to go
But before we start assembling everything permanently we need to clean the mirror and the glass and attach our darkening film to the glass pane
That's static electricity making our styrofoam stick to everything right now
Let's take our darkening film and stretch it over our piece of glass
Then we'll cut out a piece leaving a border about an inch and a half wide around the whole pane
The film has a dark side and a clear side, which is just used to make it
So it doesn't stick to yourself while you're preparing it for
This next step, I'm using this window film application solution
But you can also just use soapy water
Spray both the glass and the film so that as we lift the film and place it onto the glass
It's not sticking to everything everywhere
So at this point our film is on our glass
But it's still got all sorts of this soapy liquid inside it so we need to use a sort of squeegee to press all that
Out and make sure that the film and the glass make
Contact since I've got it laying around
I'm going to use a piece of styrofoam as my squeegee starting in the middle and pushing all the bubbles out toward the edge
That sounds horrible, but it is working
Our film is now pressed down over the whole glass pane
So I'm going to take the razor blade and trim off all of the extra
We've got the film attached to the glass and the glass and mirror are both nice and clean, so let's start assembling everything
When you're putting the glass in make sure that the side with the film on it is facing the mirror
the film might take a day or so to
Completely dry and stick to the glass so when you're putting it into the little slot
Be careful that you're not causing it to peel up
To make sure that the test-fit works with our facade piece here
Liking that too. All right. Let's take our glue gun and start attaching some of the pieces more permanently
This piece I could attach right now
But I am gonna be doing some painting on this and to make sure that I'm easily able to paint the inside edges of some
Of these parts, I'm gonna attach this piece later
I am going to trace where it is so that I know up to what point I can add the paint now
We've got most of it, built and all we need to do is add a couple of side pieces to seal it off
I Glued one side on but not the other because we need to have access to be able to put things in between the two reflective
Surfaces we have our two lights, but we don't want them to just sit in the box
So let's make a little stand for each light
There we have it all of our pieces of the infinity mirror in place
All we have left to do is a little bit of painting and secure everything down
I've got the whole thing covered in a layer of acrylic paint and now just make it pop a little extra
I'm gonna use some black ink in my airbrush
There we have it the decorative housing for the infinity mirror is now complete all this left to do is secure these two bases down
Inside turn on the tea lights and watch it go
And
Now instead of gluing this on because we want to be able to reach in and out and turn the tea lights on and off
So we don't run out of battery
I'm going to be using a couple pieces of bamboo skewer poke through the foam to hold this piece in place
There we go now we can easily pull out both of these bamboo skewers
And we need to reach in and out there you have it that is how you can build your very own
Infinity mirror of course with this one the lights are not super powerful
So it's more like a really really long mirror having quite reached infinity
I chose a castle theme because I thought the orange color of the lights mixed really well with that idea
But you don't have to use this theme if you have a different color lights you can go with a different design theme
Even if you have the same color lights you can choose what you want yours to look like I just like castle stuff I think
The effect works the best if your infinity mirror is pushed up against a light-colored
Wall it really helps with the contrast of the darkness of the tunnel with the light of the wall making it look like it's going
Through what its resting up against one more thing that I want to mention is this actually looks better in real life
We're pretty limited by the low light abilities of our camera
But when you're seeing it with your eyes the flames really pop out and they do seem to be disappearing into the wall
I really had fun showing you how I built this today, and I hope you had fun watching it
Thanks for joining us for this project and we'll see you in the next one. Talk to you then oh
That's fantastic oh
My ears are gonna ring for days after that now. It looks like the tunnel of lights is going right through me
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