Lamp shade from a bowl

 I wrote about one Dr.Rama Shastry in my previous post about a Chess board.  Whenever I went to him to play Chess, my attention used to get attracted towards a lamp he had fixed at the edge of his vintage desk that had 1000 draws [exaggerating].  It was a simple lamp with a bulb holder, which was also the clip, something like what we see on writing clipboards.  The shade was adjustable to any angle and without the bulb it was a separate unit.  I found it very very interesting.  It used the curvature of the spherical bulb for tilting to any desired angle as work was done on a desk.  It was a fantastic little lamp that tickled my ingenuity!

I wanted to make one like it for my study table too!  There was a corner shelf fixed to the wall above my study desk and the location suited for using it. The advantage of this lamp was that it asked no space on the desk as table lamps do, but all it wants is something to cling on! 

Dr.Shastry's model was an old factory-manufactured unit and I needed something similar.  So I picked up a clip from a clipboard that was discarded.  Removed the two rivets from the old board, fixed the clip to another customized piece of hardboard.  Then, I fixed an old brass bulb holder to it with small nuts and bolts and a hole for the wire to pass through. 

This became my favourite lamp for many years until I found that it was no longer required for the desk.  I made a hole in the hardboard and hung it above the sewing machine for additional lighting.  It is still in use, 36 years on.  In the above picture, I have made a shade out of a discarded aluminum rectangular bowl. This was the second such shade.

Let me tell how I had made the first one.  There was an old ceramic coated bowl lying in the attic/store room along with other junk. I thought this was the most suitable one, even if I made a hole and damaged it. The spring-clip fixed to it will cling on the bulb and the round shape of the bulb will make it tilt to any direction and the spring tension will make it stay there.  That is the beauty of this design!  The shade must not be too heavy otherwise, it will tilt down by its weight.  That was the right weight too.  

I made the spring from a damaged bicycle wheel spoke I had in my tool section. I made an 'eye' to fix it with a nut to the bowl on the inside.  Ordinary metal wires will not suit for springs.  

This was one of my many enjoyable little projects that is serving me well even today.

Powder box lampshade

The lamp itself is interesting. This is a vintage stand left behind by the old tenant who was an optician and had his clinic in our room. It has an adjustable stand. It can be tilted to any angle we desire as you can see there.  It is fixed to the wall.  The lamp now hangs on my work desk at home.  The desk is very messy and luckily it is out of the frame!  :)

Before I write anything, you must have already observed what I wanted to show, right?  You have read the title of this blog.  The old lampshade was the traditional one hanging type, like a cup.  It was suitable for incandescent bulbs and I was using it before.  When we shifted to CFLs, the vertical hanging does not suit as a table lamp.  The CFL with its long tubes has to be horizontal to get most light on the place we want. In fact, I have even turned the bulb holders pointing at a downward angle, upwards to fit and get most light from CFLs.  

This CFL table lamp now needed a shade to avoid the glare to the eye. I had this empty Johnson's Baby Powder box lying around.  Its length perfectly suited the bulb size. Look at it glow here!

I cut up one side to allow light, and a nice round hole at its bottom to fit it to the bulb holder.  I ensured that the plastic box will not touch the tube as it gets hot after some minutes of use. So it was safe. 

Under this, I can do precision work like removing tiny screws from watches for replacing batteries or even watch repair, remove tiny splinters that may sometimes get into the fingers and so on.  I am really enjoying this lampshade.  When it is not in use, I tilt it towards the wall and it does not come in the way.

Lampshades for the Yard

I have no great fondness for ready made downlighting fittings as the really good ones are too expensive if they are available at all, or those that are easily available ones are too crude and ugly.  I prefer the open type.  I needed one for the garden side yard and one for the front gate.  Both of these were made at different times using different things.

The earlier project was for the garden.  The light has to be in the open and it should be taking rain and wind also. I took an old unusable steel vessel lying idle. In fact, these ugly items are gifts given by someone during some marriage or some of their family function, which is a tradition.  For the sake of tradition, such cheap gifts are distributed and they are usually useless items. So I picked up one such among many lying there in a bag for my lampshade project.  I wanted to 'unjunk' it!

Since the light bulb had to be protected from rain, I made a hole in the bottom for the wire to pass, also through a plastic lid to prevent rainwater from seeping through the wire into the bulb connection inside the holder. It worked well when I did this simple project.

The other lampshade I made was about a year after I made the above.  This was a bit trickier, because it had to be hung some distance away from the taper design of the huge gate pillar so that light would get distributed without producing the shadow of the huge cornice of that pillar.  

There were a few ceramic coated vintage iron shades lying in a box. I picked up one of them.  Now, the tricky part. To hang it without using a nail.  I had a junked base of an old table lamp. I used a PVC water pipe and elbow [as PVC can take all weather and also be water tight] for the wire casing. The spring of the table lamp fitted into this PVC pipe also, much to my delight!  I just ran a wire around the top of the pillar, added the lamp base to it and tied the wire securely.  

See that light near the right edge of the frame. This was taken when our Night blooming Cereus was open [last August].

It has been so far good at the rain, but have to see how much swaying in the wind it can handle before the electric wire gets snapped behind the bulb holder. So far so good, almost two years on.