In the 80’s, the Jeep brand was owned by the American Motor Corporation, and the company as a whole was struggling to stay afloat. As anyone who has ever worked on a Jeep of this vintage will know, the nonsense under the hood was a veritable grab-bag of parts. Even within the same model year, an AMC Jeep might have engine components from any of the big three auto manufacturers in a variety of configurations. Basically, AMC used whatever was on special that week, and you just had to be ready to find anything and roll with it. Such seems to be the case with the power steering pumps that, for whatever reason, all used metric threads. This wouldn’t be much more than a curiosity, but the steering gear (and it’s hydraulic fittings) used all standard threads. For the uninitiated, this meant that the high pressure line going from the pump to the steering gear was metric on one end, and standard on the other. I share this information only because it makes the membrane around my brain shrivel and crack, and because I happened to have one of these pumps bouncing around in my shop. I’m fully aware that this is probably emblematic of a deep mental deficiency on my part, but I picked up this pump one day and thought: “Lamp.”
My wife works in the field of statistics, and as such collaborates with scientists around the country (and globe now that I think of it) and is always eager to share my website/art with anyone she talks to. I appreciate that she does this, but I don’t generally give it a lot of thought. One collaborator however, actually took the bait and made a point to bring up my art on a regular basis, always asking what new things I was working on and that he wished he had space in his apartment for something I’d made. He also took every opportunity to motivate my wife in her research, introduced her to and spoke highly of her to other senior researchers, and encouraged her to pursue research that had real-world implications instead of drudging through theory that the field tends to over value. Some people write ‘thank you’ cards, I make lamps. The result is a small (although not exactly light) desk lamp that looks like it grew out of a mad man’s dystopian garage. Which, I guess, it did. The power steering pump body is suspended by a section of a jeep’s flywheel ring gear above a piston cup from an industrial diesel. Wiring is run up through a section of copper tubing to a switch that is illuminated when the lamp is off. Shading the bulb, is (was) a section of a blown glass tequila bottle that can be pivoted away from the body by means of guide rail from an old Craftsman jigsaw. Surrounding the bulb is fine-mesh stainless steel tea strainer. Not to over simplify things, I added a brass quarter-turn ball valve with a tiny glass insert, a free-spinning gear from a tubing expander, and a chromed brass cap from a KitchenAid stand mixer. All-in-all, a quick little lamp to say “Thank You,” and a convenient excuse to get that brain-splinter of a power steering pump out of my life.
Post Script:
Maybe you noticed that little insert in the above paragraph where the glass shade got corrected to the past tense… That’s because, against my better judgement, I elected to trust the United States Postal Service to get this lamp from our home in Texas to our friend’s apartment in Maryland. To be fair, I didn’t give out a lot of trust, just still more than was apparently reasonable. I built a crate for this lamp out of ⅜” plywood, reenforced the edges, used rubber insulated steel strap to hold the lamp to the top and bottom of the crate, filled the whole thing with packing foam/peanuts, screwed the crate shut and built a cardboard box to go around it, then that box got an application of “fragile” stickers at the Post Office, and departed. At some point in the four days it took to arrive, the ~40lb box must have pissed somebody off and they either dropped it from a truck or threw it against a wall, because the glass shade with its silver enhanced paint and the LED bulb inside shattered. Disappointing, but again, I guess I should have known better.
15″ Tall, 7″ Wide, 8.5″ Deep
9 Bar Welding 