Lamp Fusion

You know how when they combine cuisine styles they call it fusion.  Or when musical styles are combined like jazz fusion. Well, this latest lamp is kind of like that except that it’s not two different styles but two different pieces fused.

I had a wonderful client who wanted the look of a particular table lamp set atop the base of one of my floor lamps. Of course, I said I could do it though at the moment I did not know exactly how that was going to happen.

I knew that technically there were lots of possibilities for mechanically getting them together, though granted I had actually never done any of them. The hard part was going to be making the connection between the two if not entirely seamless at least  a smooth innocuous transition, or an elegant fusion if you will.

If yoy take a look at the picture you will notice that the key transition point is between the bottom of the curve near the top and the long shaft coming from below. My gut reaction to the solution was to find a way to cradle the curve, like an extended hand cradling a small bird or a bunch of grapes or, well, you get the idea.

So I fashioned my self a piece of wood that on the bottom side I could attach to the shaft. I used a basic mortise and tenon joint, simple and solid. As for the cradling part, the first goal was to match the curve of the top of the lamp to the cradle, which is essentially an exercise in patience as futz away until the two pieces become one.

Now as the process of shaping the cradle went on I kept checking the proportion of the cradle to the rest of the lamp. What happened was that the cradle kept getting smaller and smaller, and in fact had it lost much more size may have ceased functioning as much of a cradle. But the cradle persevered and all was well with the lamp.

This entry was posted on 11. January 2009 at 13:20 and is filed under Designs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.