Big Bulb Standing Lamp

Most of my materials are given to me by friends, some I find in junk piles, others I salvage from things I disassemble. Occasionally though, I’ll find something in a store my eye insists should be something else. The glass shade on this lamp was just such an element. Originally is was a glass flower vase that I found in a clearance section while shopping for toilet paper. My wife was a little confused when I brought it home, but I insisted I had something in mind for it. I didn’t honestly know what exactly it was going to be beyond “a part of a lamp”, but I almost never let that stop me. Once I had the bottom cut off, I started working on the socket assembly and the structure that would suspend it. About that same time, a friend of mine brought by a rim from a ’48 Dodge Power Wagon that he was going to scrap, and I had my base. I used some gas pipe trimmed with brass collars and stabilized with teeth from a tractor bucket. I then tacked 45 conical roller bearings onto the vertical pipe for texture, and fitted an old Jeep piston to the top where I mounted a pull chain switch. The light fixture is suspended from the piston by two short sections of super heavy chain that allow it to swing slightly. I then mounted a secondary light within the truck rim on a separate switch; and hid all the visible wiring inside a section of copper pipe from an espresso machine. The finished piece is a little illumination from every corner that will light every corner around it.