Scrap Lamp

I built this lamp from (mostly) scrap pieces of wood. Some I collected from my old job with John Doyle and at least one I pulled out of a scrap bin in Adam Rung's shop when I was mostly finished building the lamp. I wanted a bedside table lamp and had a bit over a week off. Adam requested that I limit my activities in the shop to hand tools while he was away. I built this....mostly....with hand tools. There were brief interludes with the drill press, the table saw, and the cross-cut saw.
AND, of course, none of the wood would have been in such a workable condition had it not been joined and planed on machines at a different time.
BUT it still took quite a bit of work with my block plane to get a smooth surface on the long, narrow pieces.

I did zero sketches for this project and (oh wait, one quick doodle that is reminiscent of the finished project, but having no notion that I could or might put it together with scraps in one day) took no measurements. Consequently, the lamp turned out to be far too low to use in its intended location. So, first I hauled up an out-of-use speaker from the first floor to elevate it off the chest that I use as a bedside table. Still hovering about a foot over my sleeping or groggy head, I decided to part with it as a graduation gift for Sherpa (Dan McIntyre).

Being assembled from scraps, the lamp has a bit of a hodge-podge look. The trapezoidal piece up top is Spalted Maple. It is tacked on top of a length of what I believe is Oak which is, in turn, suspended on two sticks of Cherry (might be Mahogany left from a project with John Doyle where we needed some trim sticks for a lot of mahogany-veneered MDF). Those vertical sticks have through-tenons (which were cut poorly and needed to be supplemented by perpendicular pins: dowels) that go through a beautiful Walnut base (that I milled--then  accidentally cut to the wrong dimensions in pursuit of another project for Adam). The base is raised by two trapezoidal lengths of Cherry.
I bought the lamp hardware at Home Depot for few dollars and put a Compact Fluorescent bulb in it because the lampshade I hand-stitched from the sleeves of an old Adidas t-shirt (that I "borrowed" from Sherpa years ago) wound up being too small and ignitable for an incandescent.

Would never call it quality craftsmanship, but there it is. A satisfying days work, some lessons learned, and a fine gift for a computer nerd in need of a desk lamp.

It's getting late...coffee table stuff tomorrow. Er, over the weekend...