Margo's Dad Bruce likes to climb on things that are high up. In particular this includes rock walls, roofs, and microwave towers. Lucky for Bruce he has a friend who owns bunches of microwave towers that are out of service and just chillin in rural Kansas and Nebraska. When the price of copper went up this friend asked Bruce and his brother Brian to get all the junk copper off the tower so they could sell it for dolla dolla billz. Bruce is a hoarder and so he decided to keep random pieces of copper for no particular reason other than they look cool and maybe he could use them for something later. Enter Jay.
Jay is also a hoarder and has a deeply secret love of steampunk crap, which he denies vehemently. He and Bruce were in Bruce's basement examining the buried treasure and found the copper hoardings. Jay thought "Oh! I shall take this home to Houston for no particular reason other than they look cool and maybe I can use them for something later." Margo does not stand for such nonsense and so the hoardings quickly became a lamp inspired by this one from Pottern Barn that we couldn't afford.
Jay was goofing around with the pieces of copper and realized he could make them into a base and arm system. Then he found this cool cage, fancy wire, and old-timey light bulb on the eBay. The hardware is from our fav neighborhood Southland Hardware store. I'll show you a pic of the lamp all put together to start!
Jay is also a hoarder and has a deeply secret love of steampunk crap, which he denies vehemently. He and Bruce were in Bruce's basement examining the buried treasure and found the copper hoardings. Jay thought "Oh! I shall take this home to Houston for no particular reason other than they look cool and maybe I can use them for something later." Margo does not stand for such nonsense and so the hoardings quickly became a lamp inspired by this one from Pottern Barn that we couldn't afford.
Jay was goofing around with the pieces of copper and realized he could make them into a base and arm system. Then he found this cool cage, fancy wire, and old-timey light bulb on the eBay. The hardware is from our fav neighborhood Southland Hardware store. I'll show you a pic of the lamp all put together to start!
Hi there, its Jay. I came up with the design for this lamp by playing around with a bunch of scrap pieces until I found a combination I liked. I wanted to use as many of the old pieces as possible to keep the cost down and the cool factor up. I did have to buy a few things; check out the Marconi bulb I found. It's a low wattage so you aren't blinded when its exposed and has a cool filament pattern.
To start off the pieces of copper already had a lot of holes in them that would be usable for my lamp, but the switch was a little too big to fit in the pre-drilled holes. So I used my drill to make the hole larger for the switch as you can see in the next picture.
The switch fits! Aside: This was one of the hardest parts of the whole project. I went through about three different switches trying to find one that was both authentic looking and had a slim enough base so I didn't have to hack it into a million pieces to make it fit. Once I finally found this one on eBay it was really simple.
Next I realized I needed to paint the black base so it matched the overall look.
As you can see three pictures above, the base was hollow, so I needed to fill it in with a wood circle so I would have something solid to mount the arms to. I used my jigsaw to cut out a circle from a scrap piece of plywood. I spared you guys the 20 minutes of sanding it took me to get it to fit exactly.
Here it is snug in the base. Next I drilled the holes for the screws to attach the base to the body of the lamp.
My first thought was to use a nut on the bottom countersunk into the metal so it didn't hang out under the bottom surface of the base. This would have been way to labor intensive because I would have to drill massive holes in the bottom of the base for the nuts to fit up into. So I realized I needed to find a way to secure them without using a nut on the bottom. This may have been a secret excuse to buy a tap, because as you may have heard, I don't cost the price of tools in the overall cost of a project. By using my new tap I could thread the previously smooth hole, giving the screws ridges to snug onto without needing a nut on the bottom to hold them in place.
Here's a picture of me screwing the screw in. I used a brass nut as a spacer so the cord would have room to come out between the body and the base and to match the piece of the switch that hangs down.
Now that the base was attached securely to the body, I started working on the arms. I had three pieces of copper, so I started by drilling a hole and threading each of them so I could attach them with a screw at the fulcrum.
I used the tap again for this step.
Here's a picture of the arm pieces all attached to one another. You can also see the spacer (the little gold tube on top of the arm) that I attached with a threaded rod, again by drilling and using the tap. This is to guide the cord from the bulb down to the base.
In this picture the arms have been placed inside the body and I routed the wire up body, through the guides and down to the bulb. I wired the socket and then attached the brass cage you see to the outside to protect the bulb and make it look cooler. I also wired the switch at this time, making sure the connection was hidden up inside the body so you don't see it.
Last step was to secure the arms within the body and to the base. I did that by drilling a hole through the wood I put in the bottom. The bottom of the arms already had a threaded hole so I just put a screw in through the wood and into the arm. You can I countersunk the hole so it be flush.
Here it is installed in the bedroom looking good.
Guys it me. I know its soooooo steampunky. But Jay likes it, and since certain leases are anti-us having a real light in the bedroom this lends a little more illumination to our cave of a bedroom. It fits in very nicely with Jay's trunk nightstand that he built and our barn door headboard. Hope you enjoyed this random project!