aarn: turntable bounce lamp [furn]
I came up with the general form and idea for this lamp a couple of months ago when I realized that I could not operate my turntable that well in the dark (It’s hard to listen to all of my sick vinyl if I can’t see where the tracks are). The idea stuck with me and last Sunday I decided that I was going to attempt to design, fabricate, and document the light for my turntable within the following week.
I knew that I wanted to make it in-house, so I designed the lamp as a flat-pattern sheet metal part, with perforated seams, to make the task of bending the metal a little easier - since I don’t have a box brake. Even though this is just a one-off, I wanted to approach the design in a way where the “product” could be shipped to the end user in the flat state, and with some ingenuity, the end user could put it together with little struggle.
Unfortunately the 0.090” thick alloy 3003 aluminum put up a little bit more of a fight than I would have hoped when it came time to bend it into shape, but the seam design worked well once a technique was developed. I fashioned a makeshift brake out of a piece of jig plate which I clamped over the workpiece, and fastened to the workbench. Prior to bending, I cut the flat-pattern design from a 12x24” piece of stock using a CNC router. Sketches and the flat-pattern design are shown above. The idea behind the skewed geometry of the “bounce” portion of the light is that it would direct more light toward the tone arm on the turntable.
Once bent into shape, the light reflecting surface was masked and sprayed white with high-gloss enamel paint, in an attempt to maximize the effect of the light source. The light source for this lamp is just a battery powered 5-in florescent unit. I would have liked to do something more complicated, like a really industrial raw bulb, but I was also trying to complete it in a week and had to make some sacrifices.
Another feature of this lamp, is an integrated “now playing” record holder, which is accomplished by the addition of two tabs which stick out from the rear of the lamp. I thought that this was too functional, and it looks dumb and takes away from the overall aesthetic, but I couldn’t resist the chance to put something really useful and optional into the design. More photos of the process and the record holder part of the lamp are in my flickr set for this project.
