Mad Scientist Light Switch

First we will want to start on stacking and glueing the pieces we need to.

Remember you can use any ⅛’ material for this project.We mixed and matched from scrap material.

These too will need to be stacked and glued.

The last piece to be stacked and glued together is the handle.

Now place the HIGH VOLTAGE engraved piece on top of the main backing but do not glue this in place. Simply line up the center cut out rectangles.

Then you will want to glue the doubled up rounded topside brackets into place. Make sure that the on and off sides are both facing the same direction.

Carefully glue the side gear rails on either side. Make sure that each side is even before allowing glue to set.

Time to cut some dowels. Four 1 inch dowels will be needed.

Once we have the dowels we can start with the bottom gears.

Set the dowel center so that the the end cap nuts can be glued in place. The gears themselves  should be glued to the dowel when they are in the proper position.

We can move to the top dowel now.

The top dowel will have the geared arm glued to the dowel and capped with the nut. These should be glued in place well. Leave just a little bit of the dowel sticking out on the outer side. This whole process should be repeated on the other side before moving on.

Now that you have both sides done you will want to glue the handle in place along with the arrow indicator. Before Gluing make sure that both the handle and the arrow are both sticking straight up while the sliding gear mechanism is straight and even.

The last assembly set is to glue the square cut out to the bottom of the main backplate.

We really frankensteined this together with our scrap material. So now it’s time to paint it. 

We painted the switch plate with a Hammer metallic paint to give it that distressed metal look.

Simply remove your old switch plate and mount the new one over top. We used double sided sticky tape to mount it temporarily. But you could easily drill this to the wall on each corner to make this a permanent fixture.