I’ve been staring at JWST mirror builds for years. You know the ones-the iconic gold honeycomb that makes every nerd’s heart skip a beat. It’s been stuck in my head like a song I couldn’t stop humming.
While the 3D-printing community has some beautiful frames for these, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Spending days of print time and a mountain of plastic filament for a static frame felt wasteful. I knew there was a leaner way to do it.
The Plan:
About a year ago, I finally pulled the trigger on some gold adhesive hexagons. The Amazon photos lead you to think these tiles are huge, but the listing said they were 11cm x 12.5cm. The full array is about 20.5″ x 22″, the size for a wall piece.
The JWT has a black backing, but again, I wasn’t about to 3d print that much. I just waited until inspiration struck. The pack of tiles sat on my desk almost a literal year. I refuse to pay “Big Craft” prices. I wasn’t going to drop $10+ at Michaels or Walmart for foam core board when I knew I could get it for a buck at Dollar Tree. If that means a project sits in a drawer for 12 months until I’m near a Dollar Tree, so be it. I’m patient to a fault.
The Build:
The Dollar Tree foam core board is almost the exact size of the mirrors, so I had to use two pieces to get enough material to have the boarder around the edge. To keep it clean, I aligned the seam to sit directly behind a center row of tiles. Pro-tip on alignment: Don’t just start sticking things down. I laid everything out first. I started the actual adhesive process by centering a tile right over the board transition, making sure the corners were dead-on the edge. From there I worked toward the center, then filled out the rest. Once the “honeycomb” was locked in, I traced the boarder at 1.5cm from the tiles with a pencil and carefully did the surgical work with a ruler and a fresh razor blade. I mounted the whole thing with some extra 3M Command strips that I cut smaller. You can’t even tell where the transition of the two pieces of backer meet (Hint, in the photo it is the top left third of the design at an angle from the center left-most point to the top-right center point.)
One thing I’ve noticed with the 3D-printed versions is that if the frame doesn’t support the entire back of the tile, they tend to warp or look “wavy.” I felt that mine came out slightly less wavy than some of the ones I saw online, but certainly not as perfect as others. But for foam core they look surprisingly sharp. Total cost? Less than $20 and about an hour of slightly non-focused time. Total plastic filament wasted? Zero. It’s not a $10 billion space telescope, but for my wall, it’s close enough.