Steampunk Journey : GARBAGE LAMP!!!

POST 18

The Garbage lamp.

For the setup of this post I would like to start off by saying I have a friend who makes a living buying and selling at swap meets and flea markets. He deals will darn near anything but he always has antiques. In the travels from place to place some of his product gets broke. when this happens he normally tosses it to the side of his shed till he had a day that he loads up a ton of crap broken and screwed up pieces and brings it to the dump.

Well one day boys and girls when I
was over his house I became somewhat bored and said to myself. "Self let's see if we can fix any of this crap!" So I started to rummage through the junk. I found a bunch of cool things but most of it was either to broke to be fixed or just not worth the time. But then I found this thing. It's a boom lamp from a drafting table. now it looks like junk and it is but for some reason I love these
boom lamps

So naturally I found something I like so I ripped it apart. I painted

the boom with some strange metallic spray paint that had a really weird texture when it dried. as for the pieces that held the arm together (on right) I painted them with the same paint then applied a coat of gold Rub-N-Buff.

As for the lamp shroud I sprayed it down with again that same dark gray metallic spray paint but instead of the gold Rub-N-Buff I used an antique copper color. It came out looking very nice so I wanted to put a clear coat over it, and that's when things got really weird. I'm not sure if the clear coat I used was just really old or if it had some sort of reaction with the first paint or possible the Rub-N-Buff but when I spray it on the whole lamp shroud look as if it was beginning to crack.

And it looks AWESOME!!!! one of the best mistakes I've made in a long time.

Now it was time for a base Seeing how the lamp was originally attached to a table it had no way of standing on it's own any longer.

I began to rummage through the pile of junk again and found these beat up old tables every one of them had some thing wrong with it. I took them apart and made on nice one out of all the others so my friend could sell at least one of them but then had a pile of scrap from the others I crammed the lamp into the top of one of the pieces and kapow had a new base.

I repainted one of the broken table tops with the same spray paint again and mounted the to the bottom for added stability and just like that my Garbage lamp was done.

Now I really love this lamp. I have had so many people come to my house and go "WOW!!! That's one ugly lamp dude!!"

And I say "Yeah I know!" with a big smile on my face because the best part is that I made it from garbage with no intentions on making anything useful that day and I use this lamp every single night. So you might not like it but I love it. It really goes to show you one mas trash can truly be another mans treasure.

I also made a video for my YouTube about this lamp.