I found an LED light strip with a power supply and a cord long enough to hang my life clock on the wall when it's done. I went to a plastic place today and bought some gel glue for acrylic, and a 12" acrylic disk thick enough to be a good sturdy base upon which to mount all the crystal elements. I scribed all the positions of each separate element on the top of the disk. Then I glued each flat piece into it's correct position. These will be the placement guides for each of the assembled crystal elements. I'm having to sand each down, to take into account two things:
1. Each element has depth, and laser cutting can't do beveling, so each piece is glued inner edge to inner edge. I have to sand each piece down enough to remove enough material so each piece fits in it's proper slot. The next version, I will attempt to sand to the correct beveling before I glue them together.
2. As I assembled them I was introducing a slight amount of variation in shape. In retrospect, next time I will create paper templates upon which to glue the pieces, so I can get more uniformity of shape.
I only wish the company who makes the acrylic diffuser offered them in a red material. I will be trying gels between the lights and the front, and I will try red LEDs for a future version, but it would look really cool if the plastic itself were transparent red.
Another thing that might be interesting is to get a dimmer to fade the red lights off and on, and maybe even a sound chip with the call to carrousel "bong" sound playing in time with the on/off cycle.