I have several 6 volt lantern flashlights kicking around the shop.  However, I never use them because I generally baulk at the $7 they want for a lantern battery that can't be recharged.

So I modded a flashlight to take a 6 volt 4 Ah lead acid battery I bought at Home Depot . . . 

When we moved into our house there was an electric chandelier in our dining room.  It was an adequate enough fixture but incandescent chandeliers are terribly inefficient, six 25 watt bulbs actually put out a fraction of the amount of light as a single bulb of half the combined wattage, and while they do make candelabra base compact fluorescent bulbs, I find their light cold, harsh, and they are not very dim-able.

Besides, nothing beats real candle light for a romantic dinner at home.

Read on for details on converting an electric chandelier back to candles . . .

I was having a hard time this morning getting started working in the shop.  

I get one day a week to work in the shop and as a result I often end up with a list of things I want to get done that is about three times longer then it is possible to accomplish, stress results.

Today I decided "screw it. I'm making a lamp."  

I started with a couple of pieces of brass from an earlier, rejected, project that fit together to form a reflector and kerosene reservoir . . .

We have a new puppy in the house, and while this is a wonderful thing in general, it means I sometimes have to get up in the middle of the night to let him out. The problem is I don't have a bedside lamp so I end up stumbling across the bedroom to turn on the overhead lamp so I can find the leash as well as my robe and shoes. Needless to say this does not please The Lady. So, my next project had to be a new bedside lamp.

Like most of my lamp projects this one started with a visit to the junk bins.  At right you see part of an antique student lamp I rescued from the metal recycling bin before the ban on picking at our local dump went into effect.  It's quite nicely made, but this is all I was able to retrieve.  The other parts are from various more mundane fixtures and the bulb at left is a reproduction Aerolux glow lamp. 

. . .

As of late last year we were banned from pulling items for our town dump's metal and wood recycling bins.  The stated reason was 'public safety' but it was fairly clear from the expressions on the faces of a few of our town's selectmen during the discussion that the whole idea of 'taking things from the garbage' was abhorrent to them.

One of them related the story of seeing some folks remove a 'soiled mattress' from one of the dumpsters.  He feared that the town could be held liable for 'disease' if this form of reuse were allowed to continue.

While we generally love and respect the Victorians and their technology here at the Steampunk Workshop, we do think that our public officials need to have a more modern understanding of epidemiology.

One of the tragic realities of Angle Lamps is that many have been electrified in a crude and destructive manner. Below is such a lamp. I bought this lamp on eBay thinking that it was solid brass. I intended to move the burners from a tin plate Angle Lamp over to this body. However, when it arrived I discovered that it was tin plate also and, in fact, had only a brass wash that had been destroyed inan attempt to polish the lamp. All in all a pretty sad case.

The Angle Company of New York manufactured these unique lamps from the early 1890's until 1929. In my opinion the Angle Lamp is the pinnacle of kerosene wick lamp design. This is a two burner version. They also commonly came in 3, 4 and (much rarer) 6 and 8 burner versions as well. Single and two burner wall mount lamps and a single burner student lamp were also made. They came in a variety of paterns and materials. This is the simplest, a tin plated steel can with nickle plated burners.

This kerosene lamp will hang over the dinette in my school bus camper conversion project and as such will need to be a functional decor piece so this is more of a repair then a restoration or conservation project.

I'm really happy with this one, the proportions work really well, it's sexy in a Mae West kinda way.

This is a lamp for my bus conversion project, most likely it will go in the bathroom. Total project time was about an hour.

Here's another real quick project, the two donor lamps are below, both came from our town dump this past weekend.  This will be my first lamp with a glass font.  Furthermore, this font has a hole in the bottom so I will be making liberal use of the non-traditional material; GE Silicon II Sealant.