well I built this giant kaleidoscope for my grandchildren to play with it turned out to be so interesting that I ended up playing with it more than they did here's how I did it I bought to back up the door mirrors for Walmart these are 1 foot wide and 5 feet long and worked out really good there are only six dollars a piece which is pretty cheap begin by stripping off the paper backing off of the backside and then carefully carefully using a knife cut away the hot glue that's used to and stick the mirror to the framework take the framework off and discard it next I leave their top edges together and a convenient angle and secured the top edge with some strapping tape the mirrors rest on a piece of scrap plywood I had which is covered with a piece of black cloth this does a couple of good things first of all the cloth provides a dark contrasting border for the images that will be formed on the far end of the kaleidoscope and another is that they provide enough grip so that the Mayers can be slid around a little bit and it won't flatten out and collapse on you finally covered the far end of the kaleidoscope what the sheet of paper just lean it up against the end to give you some contrast to focus on all you're looking for is the shape not to create an image and then move the sides of the mirrors in and out until you get a whole number of evenly sized segments all the way around now I have found that setting the angle here to about 45 degrees which creates an eight-sided image works about the bed but you can spread them out to 60 degrees to get a six-sided image or push them into 30 degrees and you'll have a what is it a ninth of pull sided image either way adjust the angle to what however many PI segments you want in your kaleidoscope and you're done oh but before we do I wanted to touch on mirror quality now normally kaleidoscopes use what are called first surface mirrors that means that the surface of the mirror itself is coated with the silver that reflects and not the backside this is to prevent double images which can occur with regular mirrors like this that's not an issue for a giant kaleidoscope because the images are so large the even though the double image effect is there it's so small that you can't see it and this is nice because if you wanted to build something this big out of first surface mirrors it probably cost you close to $1,000 a very simple and effective way to make some interesting designs is to just take a focusable flashlight and shine it down the the length of the kaleidoscope from the end you're viewing in and this way you can actually control the image if you put something in between the flashlight and the end of the sculpt for example in this case I've just put my fingers there you can create some more complex images this is a lot of fun to play with you never know what you're going to capture the magic of kaleidoscope says that they can create amazing images out of very mundane objects for example this simple sign that I'm moving around at the end of the kaleidoscope here's another example where I'm using a simple archery target and again moving it around to create different images to make things even more interesting we can use a number of different types of projectors to project moving lights onto a sheet of paper covering the end of the kaleidoscope for example here we have an aurora borealis projector which creates patterns such as you see here for something even more bizarre you can use something like a board lamp this one's really bizarre let me move the board lamp around a little bit to see what different images we can make with it you but my favorite is this Christmas light projector which is designed to be put outside your house and project the flowing patterns of lights onto the side of your house when you use this as a projector onto a piece of white paper at the end of the kaleidoscope here's what you get which produces amazing images such as this in this case I have it projecting onto a piece of white typing paper it diffuses the image a little bit and provides an interesting blurring effect if instead we use a sheet of plastic that's been frosted with a piece of sandpaper you get a slightly sharper image some people like it better here's what it looks like it's definitely brighter and some people like this better what these images fail to capture though is the firework sort of brilliance that these projectors can create in a large kaleidoscope like this one of the big advantages of building a large kaleidoscope like this is that the large windows at either end allow you to use a much wider range of objects to create your images than in a regular kaleidoscope I think it's try building one of these you'll be surprised at how much fun and how interesting it is as always thank you for watching