Thursday, January 2, 2014

Seeing Things By Steam



This is a really simple one. The pipes are a bunch of PVC piping fitted together into a pleasing shape, with wires salvaged from an old lamp run through them. The assembly was primed and covered with hammered copper textured spray paint. Once that dried, I attached the cords for the light ends to some standard pull-chain sockets (I liked the Bakelite-ish look), epoxying them in place, and wired the other ends together to a plugged cord with some wire nuts and electrical tape. Add the 40 watt Edison bulbs (below) and it's ready to roll.



The only bit that required more than minimal effort was the fake gauge:



The body of the gauge is a PVC end plug:



I partly filled the interior with epoxy, printed out a gauge face dial based on an image I found on the net, put that in the plug with a bit of a needle for an indicator, and covered it with more transparent epoxy. I secured it to the lamp by drilling a hole through the back and screwing it in:



It's a nice decorative lamp, though the low-wattage bulbs means that it doesn't provide a lot of light, and it's sufficiently lightweight (a couple of feet of half-inch PVC pipe doesn't weigh much) that I might want to add a more solid base.