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Once upon a time, I owned a 1939 Chevrolet pickup truck, and was working on putting a modern-ish Chevy 350 and a T-5 transmission in it. In the process of converting a Camaro transmission into one better suited for the seat position of a truck, I ended up with a spare Borg-Warner T-5 tailshaft housing kicking around (this is the back end of a transmission in a rear wheel drive car/truck). It's a nice example of a complex, mass-produced diecast aluminum part. One cold night in Syracuse, it turned into a lamp.
Ok, it took more than one night. I started and stopped on it a few times, but it eventually became a useful lamp and a fun conversation piece. It's my idea of Restoration Hardware.
Ingredients:
Body--T-5 tailshaft housing, cleaned, wire brushed, and sealed with clear laquer
Switch--Standard on/off/dimmer wall switch, mounted to a 3/16" aluminum plate (also brushed and laquered), which mounts to the flange that usually mounts the gear shift lever. The knob is a cabinet pull I found at Lowe's! Fasteners are standard Allen head cap screws with black oxide finish.
Lamp parts: Lamp rod, bulb socket, and wiring were all taken from an ugly lamp I found in my basement. Lamp hardware is easy to find at most hardware stores, or you can buy an ugly lamp at Goodwill and cannibalize it.
Lamp rod mounting: The driveshaft end of the transmission (the top end in Lamp Mode) has a hole much bigger than the ~1/2" lamp rod, but I found an aluminum pulley, turned down one lip of it until it fit into the transmission, then used two thin nuts to lock the rod to the pulley (bottom picture). The pulley is held in place on the housing with a thin bead of RTV silicone. Simple but effective.
I love lamp. -Brick
so much depends... -WCW
Here's a series of letterpress poem postcards I made in 2011-2012, as a way of sharing my work with friends after graduate school. I was missing the connection and camaraderie of workshop and community, and started making these in ~50 card editions at the San Francisco Center for the Book, after I finished the Center's Core Cylinder Press program.
I printed them all on a Vandercook proof press with water-based ink, and after the postal service was less-than-kind to the first "You Have Never" batch, I switched over to French cover stock and love it. I've hand-set type before, and it's a surprisingly meditative process... but I printed these with photopolymer plates and a Boxcar base. For "You Have Never" I also made my own plates in a plate-making class at SFCB, but for the others, I sent my designs to Boxcar Press.
You Have Never--Designed with InDesign, plates made at SFCB, printed @ SFCB on Crane Lettra paper, three press runs (front text, blind emboss, and reverse mailing info)
The others--Designed with InDesign and Photoshop, plates made by Boxcar Press, printed @ SFCB on French 100# Speckletone cover stock, three press runs/card (front text, background image, and reverse mailing info)
I jumped into the financial rabbit hole of modular synthesis when Rare Waves released a Eurorack modular version of the Grendel Drone Commander. The common starting point for a modular system is a "skiff"--a simple case that can hold the basic building blocks of a synth. But, the new Drone Commander is a chubby little module, and won't fit in shallow skiffs. So, I bought the basic building blocks of a skiff--mounting rails and a power supply--then scored a vintage Kennedy toolbox on eBay. Lots of planning, some leftover maple I had kicking around, and bags of tiny screws later, I made a custom, kinda-sneaky synthesizer. With the case closed, it looks like a toolbox. Now, to figure out how to make music with it...