A year or so ago, a friend of mine, bought one of the original Classified Moto lamps http://classifiedmoto.bigcartel.com/product/classified-moto-lamp-original-with-spring-cover, and I fell in love with it, but couldn't justify spending the money on one. Now that I've accumulated a small collection of junk parts from a few junk bikes some friends and I have scavenged parts from for our respective bike build projects, a couple of us thought we'd try our hand at creating our own.
Here's the start to my own floor lamp version, which will be a modified knock-off of this design, but at about 1/10th the total investment.
http://classifiedmoto.bigcartel.com/product/classified-moto-floor-lamp
This will be going in my son's nursery (he's due to arrive around the New Year). Excuse the cell phone pics. It's all I had with me at the time
My base: an old Honda(?) brake rotor that I literally dug out of the scrap steel dumpster behind my work. It was nasty, rusty, and covered in some kind of paint overspray, and had peeling paint on the cast center carrier, but after a few minutes under the wire wheel on my angle grinder, it looked like this:
Since I wanted a floor lamp instead of a desk / table lamp, I needed some kind of shaft to extend its height, but instead of using any plain pipe, I took Classified Moto's idea of using fork tubes, but (I think) improved upon it. To get the height I wanted, I figured I'd need about 3/4 of two fork legs, joined end-to-end, but I didn't want an ugly mid-pole weld, that would have to be ground down and possibly ruin the look of the sanded fork tubes, so I did the following.....
I took the fork caps from a 1980(?) Kawasaki KZ750 4cyl.
and spent some time on this after work:
....to turn down that casting lump for the air fittings. I performed this modification on both caps, but the before & after is shown above.
Then, by drilling a 1/2" +/- hole through the center of both, it allowed me to join then pair together as seen below, via a hollow threaded rod, found in the build-your-own lighting-source section of any Lowes, Home Depot, etc. Note that these rods are not English OR Metric threaded, but rather IP threads, so be sure to get the right nuts to match.
Now I could thread the two tubes together, with a highly-finished look, and still able to accept a power cord run up the center of it all. Fork tubes are obviously from the same donor bike as the caps.
That's all for now, but I shold have the finished product ready to share by this weekend. DTT member, fresh_c will be loaning me the use of his welder and/or welding skills, and a few parts (tranny gear, rear shock, etc) off a CB400T parts bike that he's also robbed parts from for his own desk / table lamp. His lamp is already finished an fuctional, so perhaps he'll share it here as well, but you'll have to wait a few day to see mine completed.
Stay tuned.......
Here's the start to my own floor lamp version, which will be a modified knock-off of this design, but at about 1/10th the total investment.
http://classifiedmoto.bigcartel.com/product/classified-moto-floor-lamp
This will be going in my son's nursery (he's due to arrive around the New Year). Excuse the cell phone pics. It's all I had with me at the time
My base: an old Honda(?) brake rotor that I literally dug out of the scrap steel dumpster behind my work. It was nasty, rusty, and covered in some kind of paint overspray, and had peeling paint on the cast center carrier, but after a few minutes under the wire wheel on my angle grinder, it looked like this:
Since I wanted a floor lamp instead of a desk / table lamp, I needed some kind of shaft to extend its height, but instead of using any plain pipe, I took Classified Moto's idea of using fork tubes, but (I think) improved upon it. To get the height I wanted, I figured I'd need about 3/4 of two fork legs, joined end-to-end, but I didn't want an ugly mid-pole weld, that would have to be ground down and possibly ruin the look of the sanded fork tubes, so I did the following.....
I took the fork caps from a 1980(?) Kawasaki KZ750 4cyl.
and spent some time on this after work:
....to turn down that casting lump for the air fittings. I performed this modification on both caps, but the before & after is shown above.
Then, by drilling a 1/2" +/- hole through the center of both, it allowed me to join then pair together as seen below, via a hollow threaded rod, found in the build-your-own lighting-source section of any Lowes, Home Depot, etc. Note that these rods are not English OR Metric threaded, but rather IP threads, so be sure to get the right nuts to match.
Now I could thread the two tubes together, with a highly-finished look, and still able to accept a power cord run up the center of it all. Fork tubes are obviously from the same donor bike as the caps.
That's all for now, but I shold have the finished product ready to share by this weekend. DTT member, fresh_c will be loaning me the use of his welder and/or welding skills, and a few parts (tranny gear, rear shock, etc) off a CB400T parts bike that he's also robbed parts from for his own desk / table lamp. His lamp is already finished an fuctional, so perhaps he'll share it here as well, but you'll have to wait a few day to see mine completed.
Stay tuned.......