Japanese lamp from recycled materials

Step 10 Switch on, stand back, admire!

And you're done!

A few notes- the lamp is very light and not very strong, so don't put it somewhere it will get knocked around. With an 11W CFL it gives a soft glow that is ok to read by but won't light up a whole room brightly.

Running for an hour with the lid on, the paper on the lid was slightly warm to the touch and the sides were room temperature so it's probably safe to leave on for long periods, but if you are using an incandescent bulb I would suggest not using the lid.

The lamp is not at all fire safe- don't even think about using a naked flame or other combustion-based source of light in this rather than the lightbulb. Again I accept no responsibility for what you do outside the scope of these instructions.

Comments

[derekns74]

Cool lamp. Just make sure you use don't use an incandescent bulb. It would get too hot, and probably reach the flash point of the paper in a couple hours. a 5w spiral cfl would work really well.

[PKM]

I did think of that- I don't think it would be a major fire hazard but I'd rather not do it anyway. I had to look it up, and I was surprised to see the glass of incandescent bulbs does actually reach the ignition temperature of paper, so it is definitely better off without. A 5W CFL might be a bit dim though, the paper does block a fair amount of light, but the 11W I tested it with only got slightly warm so is probably a good compromise.

[derekns74]

Nah, 5w CFL is actually really bright. Fully thing is, you can't get them in candella base. Least I can't find them. you can get the 11w ones (40w equivalent) in candella base. Might be a good safety feature to make sure you build this with either the CFL only base you used, or a candella base, so if someone does later replace the bulb with an incandescent, the only bulb they'd find that would fit would be a nite lite bulb. I thought the bulb you were using was a 5w (25w equivalent) I wasn't saying yours was too big. any CLF will be cool enough for use in a paper lamp.

I don't complain about everything, just mostly everything. =P