I wish i have that one in my room Gothic light looks good. Please check out Aurora Lighting's exciting new Low Energy video @ http://bit.ly/5N7e6S
Enjoy!

"I wonder how Mr. Nik Willmore (http://www.uncommongoods.com/item/item.jsp?item...) feels about all this…"

My production line is on hold as I finalize a brand new internal design that doesn't require seventeen hair thickness accurate parts that nobody can even see on the outside. I suffered a cash crunch and personal trauma of a 17 year old relationship ending without warning and seeing my household income plummet from half a million to zero, overnight. It was time for Google's top lawyer to do her own thing finally since that job that I basically steered her into changed her life. Finding a replacement roommate is the minutia of life that has been holding me back. And that's the story of sole proprietorship and doing everything myself in an albeit rather advanced fabrication studio. I use carbide and CNC and invented my own dimmers that, by the way, avoid heating issues and also lack all hysteresis so you can dim upwards as well as downwards. The new design looks much the same except for a funky new pilot light.

The DIY crowd has honored my design with homemade versions for years now. I hardly even consider mine a design. It just created itself one day when I wanted to make a joke product for a friend I was working with to make high end solid state audio products with. He lacked business experience so other large companies finally caught up and made icosahedral speakers after I backed out. The Tube Lamp has been my CNC and CAD/CAM training project. It still has legs in it. My big mistake (besides not reading my girlfriend's sexy little mind) was to do high volume discounted and lower retail priced sales that were so seasonal that Christmas became 500 to 1500 lamps (er "lighting sculptures").

I call them lighting sculptures since a design patent would not help much outside hiring a bulldog lawyer who keeps going to trial every time a cool guy with a soldering iron and woodworking skills makes a fun rendition of the IDEAL concept of multiple dimmed down light bulbs adding up to real lighting. That they cast multiple shadows only shows up on the wall or when you are underlining a book. I like nine shadows of my fountain pen though. So the only intellectual property I have on this thing is COPYRIGHT of the sculpture. That means nobody can call it a Tube Lamp but more so and obvious as hell, they can't claim it IS a Tube Lamp nor copy my carbide etched signature and sell it as something I myself made. I rely on simple trade secrets and very precise design to avoid simple knock offs. Sure the Chinese could make a PLASTIC instead of Bakelite version but the design is really all about material fetish. In my case it's shiny Bakelite, matched chrome hardware, a very precisely adjusted switch and knob (!) tension, and a pristine mirror that uses real aluminum. So I'm not of a school of design with this high tech hand assembled item. My costs, now that machine tools are paid for, are for bulk parts only and perhaps an hour max of cheap student assistance to do manual labor. I'm an inventor at heart so "craftmanship" is merely boring manual labor to me. I designed this object to be easy to make by a cute muse quality design student, so my job except in lousy times like these is to orbit around, hold court and play music and movies, while cruising through 1000 page catalogs, sketching out ideas for new tweaks, jigs, tools and materials to make assembly a more robust process and thus more psychologically fun and meditative.

What do I think? I think this person is fairly dabbling in design and entrepreneurship in the craft market. I'd ask that he tactfully avoid a 3X3 version to avoid direct confusion with my own soon to be ramped up Tube Lamp design.

I also have sourced a miniature tube bulb that is not in any supplier's catalog but so far lack a matching socket. LEDs and even dimmable florescents simply don't work for this type of effect. One day I simply got a store bought T10 bulb and dimmed it down. Wow! The tiny bulb would allow even more interesting designs, if I can create my own sockets, that is, and actually find time to call China over and over before I can obtain my own batch of them instead of just a couple samples from a recent trade show full of LEDs and only a few new incandescent designs, mostly halogen.

My latest project is jewelry and that will have zero knock off potential since I'm using microprocessor equipment to make it in full 3D sculptural form with vapor deposited metals and embedded gemstones etc. Ridiculous stuff you can do, tinkering around with 3D mirrors. A fly's eye the creates a 3D image of you staring back at yourself, a hundred times over, is just to wild to imagine. And it draws you in. So I'm still working with optics.

Alas, the economy sucks. So I'm focusing on frugality. Costco and bulk storage shelves in my bedroom, towering over my CNC machine. Hydroponic gardening. Ugh, I'm becoming an urban survivalist.

Tube Lamps are now $225 retail, back ordered indefinitely. They should become $185 for a time, direct from me, or even $165 if I need cash flow. Then when I get them back into lots more REAL shops with real people walking in, the price will pop back up to $225 so I'm not undercutting my retailers. So get one of this guy's versions now, while he still makes them. When he gets a wholesale order (50% or less or sticker price) for 500 of them, inertia will set in like it did to me. But now I have a new design, retrograde business model (no catalogs!), and $100K of machine tools and a decade of experience to add to my Ph.D. in chemistry and nanotech to fall back on...as long as the economy picks up again in time for there to be a wave to catch at all. Direct sales over the net are so utterly random. I only get repeat sales that way. Also, I can't even get a DOLLAR for a $225 lamp on Ebay. Selling to architects or decorators sucks too. They don't do wild table lamps, only chandeliers, and they rip off their clients who then look up my web site and balk at the price their middleman is charging them so I must become part of a lie. Direct sales is too lonely as well.

As long as Google can quickly turn up MY name in a search for home brew versions, this sort of grass roots internet activity helps me greatly. The dumbest thing anybody can do though is set up shop claiming to be a Designer with a new DESIGN PIECE, with little real aesthetic story, and and yet being in obvious debt to me as if I'm a large corporation they are hitching a ride onto. The story of making lamps for friends and then putting up a web site is enough to avoid the curse of DESIGN STUDENT lameness as well. I've been seriously knocked off before and I just ignore it in order to let the person crash and burn. Finally, steampunk is amusing to me at best. I don't attach to trends in fashion and steampunk is very much an internet aesthetic. It avoids tackiness at least, but mostly lacks the true fit and finish of otherworldly objects (from another history line) in that I still have to prefer my own collection of "Victorian" scientific instruments that have none of the cartoonish design features of exposed stationary gears and non-functional pressure gauges. Take a look at McMaster.com and notice their old world engravings of totally contemporary industrial equipment and tools. I get the print catalog and it's just normal to me that metal and composites, glass and rubber and stainless steal are materials to think of when making stuff. It's just that you need carbide tooling to cut it and computers to guide the tool if you want to sit back and wait an hour for 500 little parts to get cut.

I'll give one trade secret away. I polish my own hex drive dome head screws that I am switching to Phillips drive in order to skip a thread tapping step, but I can use the same hand held jig made of black circuit board fiberglass epoxy sheeting, CNC cut into a thick sandwiched plate that safely holds 50 screws for a large buffing machine that uses an albeit trade secret of a ceramic buffing compound that in one step converts cheap screws into Harley Davidson quality mirror finish ones. They sell chrome plated ones for a dollar each, even, no better than what costs me a couple pennies. This is my own DIY effort at work as suppliers switch brands randomly and I get a batch of dull finish screws one day and am STUCK with them since I lack any supplier who carries COMMODITY priced screws (or self-tapping screws at all).

My main trade secret is how I hold down 500 pinky tip sized CNC cut tension adjusting washers for perfect knob motion (which is what sells lamps like crazy along with the exactly hard but not too hard to lift the whole lamp up loud click of the switch), along with 50 circuit boards at a time, and also how to stuff PCBs in bulk before soldering them in a mini solder bath and where to get cheap bulbs now that most suppliers stopped carrying them due to incandescent bans that wont even effect 25W bulbs.

I typically have 100 lamps stacked up in one of maybe three stages, followed by a final stage of being ready to be boxed in exactly the right sized box.

The Tube Lamp was my first product that sold well enough to sustain itself and thus become very optimized in its design...but not quite enough to scale up for real. I had each bulb be held in a socket that could ROTATE 360 degrees except for a stop pin...so the user could align each filament forwards. That was definite boutique overkill and knocking off my own lamp threw that idea out. The risk is always that I will get a batch of sloppy bulbs and they will go in crooked with no more flexibility in the socket mounting. That would not kill the product like happened for a month when my only supplier of cheap bulbs started shipping GREEN ones (!). The entire ceramic glue holding the socket metal to the glass was lime green. So I ordered a case from Westinghouse. They arrived broken. Another supplier shipped SUPER HOT bulbs that thankfully are not common. They did that to increase the life span. Since I limit my dimmers I have no heat or life span issues at all as long as I avoid weirdly hot bulbs that don't give off much light.

This is fun. I'm procrastinating on using a new design to more profitably go back to my roots, selling lamps (and testing new ones very easily thus as well) though small high end storefront shops and a few lighting showrooms as well. It's fun as hell pounding the pavement, offering a single display model for free and shipping out product as the fax orders come in. Small full-time business is great once you've invested in paid off tooling that is ridiculously professional. But bouncing back from a lull can be quite slow when it occurs, out of the blue. Your business is your income but your business isn't your life so saving money and further tweaking a new design can take over...until your brother links you to a budding competitor who could calmly ride the tail end of steampunk into the real arts and crafts movement that will likely follow...so you better get your act together too.

-=Nik=-

Force-justify/wordwrap weirdness is what happened there.

Cool idea, going to have to incorporate Mad Scientist lights into the monitor I'm building.

Woah... what happened there?

I wonder how Mr. Nik Willmore (http://www.uncommongoods.com/item/item.jsp?item...) feels about all this...

A perfect candidate for a brass embellished remake, possibly built up from an old candelabra.

Quite so!
To the hardwarestore!

I applaud your hands-on nature, Mr Thadweiler! I had provided a link to the instructables above for the more DIY readers, but I'm sure you understand that some people aren't that way inclined (or have no time to be so). for them, Mr Berman provides a service - to the rest, he provides inspiration!

"if you had a blimp, would you spend time on a webpage?" - You're absolutely right, I love that reflection. Thank you for spreading Stephane's project across the Channel, I posted one more video especially for you on the blog. Do you feel like awaiting Stephane on your side in June, on the D-day.... ? just an idea... Laurence

Found this in five minutes searching. In case you don't want to spend a hundred dollars on a lamp. not that Mr Berman's work isn't beautiful. I'm just a do-it-myself, nutless-bolt-broke, kinda guy.

http://www.casemodvideos.com/project/work-logs/...

wow love those, a steampunk replacement for thet romantic candle light dinner