I met Laura earlier this year and she has been very patient while I have been working on a few -yet to be revealed projects. She asked if I could help her to make a floor standing lamp to her unique vision.
We sat down for a chat and came up with a few ideas including using a gramophone horn for a lampshade, next was for Laura to draw up a sketch (above). The drawing helped me to get an understanding of her idea and to source the parts to fabricate it from.
I put together a rough base with one of the vintage horns from Tom in the south of France [which we now belive to be lighthouse horns!] then arranged to hook up with Laura to see if I was on the right lines.
After our rendezvous in the workshop I realised quite how much detailing was required. We added the cam from my 1930s radial aero engine which is a great piece of engineering and medley of aluminuim and steel...
which will work perfectly with the modifided valve handles that detail the horn.
Laura also loves the look of polished and green oxidised coppers so I took the horn (which is steel) up to the metal platers. The pic above shows the plating before polishing and the pic below shows how it looks buffed up and the beast of a machine that I used to acheive this.
Standing at almost 6 feet tall here is a photo of how it looks at the mo [The height will be adjustable by about a foot]. Laura bought a super cheap lamp shade from a charity shop to get an idea of how things might look and to get a better idea of how the gramophone horn was going to work. After some confabulation I am to experiment with some chemicals to create a greenish/turquoise faze to certain areas of the copper horn, then wire the base up so it can be used while I try to find a brass gramophone horn to top things off and compleate the assemblage........
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