Tuesday 1 November 2011

12 kvart pendant


Materials: 12 Kvart spotlights, 12 light bulbs (e.g. 5 watt), 10 fixtures (two with 5 ports and 8 with 4 ports), piece of MDF/hardboard, white tape, piece of rope, saw, screwdriver, drill, pincers, white paint (optional)

Description: This description is for a pendant with 12 Kvarts. Using more or less Kvarts is possible (personally I think that "more is more" applies here; 9 is probably the minimum to construct a nice pendant still, and 24 is likely to be very cool!)



- Unpack each spotlight and cut off the wire at the switch
- Make sure that there is ~10cm of wire from the spotlight
- Cut off the switch and plug from the remaining piece of wire and throw those away
- Keep the excess pieces of wire (those will later be used to make the knot on the top of the pendant)
- Split the wire as shown


- Take the piece of MDF/hardboard and outline the attachment of the 12 spotlights
- The large circles indicate where the upper ends of the original Kvart spotlight (see picture 1 and 2 for this detail) will be attached
- Make sure there is enough room in between the attached lamps to fit 12 holes for the 12 wires
- The small filled circles indicate where the holes for the wires will be drilled


- Take the saw and cut the piece of MDF to the minimum. Note that this doesn't need to be done very nicely, as it will be invisible in the end
- Drill the 12 holes for the wires (see Picture3)
- Drill a hole in the middle of each large circle (see picture3), such that the Kvarts can be attached
- Attach the Kvarts to the MDF/Hardboard
with the screw that come with te Kvarts


- Put the wires through the holes and attach to the fixtures

Unfortunately I do not have a detailed picture of this, but it is important to split the brown and blue wires and have them (12 of each color) come into 1 such that it can be attached to the power outlet. This is done by doing the following for each color of wire:
- put three wires of the same color into 1 fixture with 4 ports (do this 4 times such that all 12 wires are used)
- Take a piece of excess one-color wire and put it in the remaining port. Do this 4 times and put the other ends in the 5-port fixture.
- Use the remaining port of the 5 port fixture for a one-color wire of which you attach the other side to the power outlet in the ceiling (usually via a connector). This is the point that the two colors come 'together' again in a normal piece of wire

- NOTE1: I realize that this description is bit cryptical, so you may want to draw this design before you start
- NOTE2: Make sure you do this properly to avoid short-circuiting

- Test the lamp to see if everything works, when the wiring is done (At this point you can still easily fix it, when the pendant is finished you must undo the knot to fix the wiring)
- Take the piece of rope and tie this around the MDF/Hardboard. This will serve to hang the pendant to the ceiling. I tied a piece of excess wire to the rope and made a knot at the other side to hang it from a hook in the seiling. I realize that this is a bit rickety so you can do this in a more sophisticated way if you wish
- Tape the fixtures to the MDF/Hardboard, and make sure both the hanging wire and the electrical wire sticks out
- To get the best result, make sure the tape is the same color as the wire of the knot (white in my case). As my tape was slightly yellow-ish, I used some spraypaint to paint it white

- Make the knot by wrapping the 12 excess pieces of white wire that you cut off in the beginning (see description of picture 1) around the taped top of the pendant
- do this in a evenly distributed, chaotic way to get the result as shown in the picture

Enjoy!

~ Daan, Amsterdam

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