Fortunate Folly Lamp

Have you ever had an idea so bad that you had to follow through on it? That seemed to be a theme with this lamp. It all started simply enough; take a kerosene headlight/turn signal lamp from a Ford Model T, put a lightbulb in it, make it a desk lamp. Easy. Then while I was cleaning a hundred years of rust and dirt, I broke the top of the chimney off. No problem, I’ll just reposition it to the back and the Ford logo will be more visible. Did that and capped the chimney with a chromed clean-out cover. The original glass had long since disappeared, but I had the glass and cage from an old wash-down lamp that I thought would look just right. I spent two (ok, probably more) days modifying the lamp head so the new glass would screw into it with the cage mounted over it. The turn-signal lens was also missing though, so I dug around for more glass. Out came a polarizing lens from an old camera. To be clever, I etched my logo in reverse on the lens so that when the lamp is on, the logo illuminates. For the base, I decided on a harmonic balancer from a Ford diesel engine. Between the base and the lamp head, I used all-thread sleeved in square aluminum tube bolted to three rocker arms from a jeep motor. Those were welded together around a nut, into which is screwed a handle from a barbecue smoker. I welded a washer to that and then to the lamp head. So far so good. Then two more bad ideas. First, “I should add a second light to the base”, second, “I should use a keyed switch like I did on the Ignition Lamp.” Those ideas don’t sound terrible in the abstract, but executing them required overcoming a domino chain of obstacles. First the “easy” one, the keyed switch. I had a key activated switch from an elevator panel that a friend had given me, but I didn’t have the key. I rooted around in the shop and found a set of luggage keys that were “close,” and hand-filed them down to fit. The switch itself got mounted to the inside of the base, but wasn’t long enough to reach the outside edge, so the keys had to be left long enough to reach it. That resulted in them wanting to fall out of the keyhole. So I pressed a brass bushing into the base, and then pressed an aluminum bushing into that to support the keys without preventing them from reaching the switch… Woof. Second stupid idea, add another light source for the base. Can’t just have a naked lightbulb sticking up blinding folks, gotta cover it with something. Some friends had given me a standing lamp that had had one of its white glass panels broken. The remaining three panels look like flower petals and this seemed like the perfect time to use them up. The problem was how to attach them? More accurately, how to attach them so they could be removed so the lightbulb could be accessed. After a week of tinkering, I drilled holes in the glass so they could be attached to three bolts welded to three nuts that slide/spin on three jeep engine pushrods that are wedged between the rocker arms and the base. All these poor decisions culminated in a lamp that was maybe not such a bad idea after all.