Lamp rig

A quick hack to replace a 500W halogen lamp that broke during a photo shoot. Made this simple bulb rig by affixing some GU5.3 lamp holders to a piece of wood via straightened L-brackets and installed what bulbs I had at hand (adding up to about 200W).

The rig is mounted on top of a Ikea Grundtal door hanger, no need to affix the two together since the counterweight given by the lamp transformers (hung on the opposite side of the door) is enough :)

The lamp rig installation kit à la Ikea.

Photo shoot a-go-go.

As for the actual project, well, more on that in a few weeks.

Wire LED lamp repurposed

Time for a quick hack! Got a pyramid crystal tower LED lamp for christmas similar to this:

LED wire tree, pic by Michelle (click image to visit).

Pretty fucking horrible :D .. To make it even worse, the LEDs used are of very cold/clean white light type (unlike in the picture above). Put this thing on the shelve, power it up and it’s like the whole thing is shouting “HEY! I’m here and will MAKE SURE YOU NEVER FORGET CHRISTMAS!”. Not wanting to trash this set of 32 pre-wired and perfectly usable LEDs, I decided to figure out an alternate use for them. The solution: a moody night-light for the bedroom!

CD stack lamp

CD lamp by Chad Johnston

I’ve been eye-balling CD stack lamps such as this, this and this for ages, naturally with the intent of making one myself. I actually even started working on one several years ago (2006 or so), but kinda forgot about it shortly afterwards as the lamp solution turned out relatively inefficient. Back then, my plan was to use recycled CCFLs (stripped from old TFT displays). With these, it quickly became apparent that the energy consumption (around 15W) wasn’t really up to par with the amount of light created. Sure enough, lamp projects such as this should be considered mainly for decorative purposes with little emphasis given to functional lighting. But still, getting a bit more than a dim glow would be nice. After all, the CD stack dims down the light source to some extent.