What to do with an edison retro industry incandescant light bulb?



Steampunk design skills can very well be extended with 3D printing. Amazing stuff can be made that way. On this page I will show you my first attempt to use some impressive gears to create a dimmable desk lamp. In hindsight it was a fairly easy job with a great result. Most of the time I was waiting for the printer to do the work for me.
It all started out with a surplus fitting and a light dimmer. And since I recently built  3D printer I thought of a large gear to become the housing of a steampunk desk lamp. Below you see the printer just finished printing the base.



For the plastic I used some PLA that I had lying around. Since I was going to paint the plastic parts anyway, the colour of the plastic didn't matter.
Next I printed a smaller gear that was going to be the knob for the dimmer. Acrylic paint with brass particles is excellent to give a modern piece of plastic a vintage Victorian look. And finally I bought a marvelous edison retro industry incandescant light bulb from lightinthebox.com They have a variety of models and filaments but I thought that 40W would be good enough.



Painting takes a while. I needed two layers.



If you want to print these parts yourself, download the stl-file directly by clicking on the pictures below. The parts are specified for a 6 mm dimmer knob and an E27 fitting.
Now it's time to put some ornaments on the base. You can use whatever you like, the next picture shows what I had lying around. Then mount the fitting and the dimmer. To ensure that the dimmer would not come loose I added some hot glue to it.



All that is left is a power chord and the dimmer knob. The power chord got an extra sleeve made from a shoe lace from which the center core was removed. This results in a vintage look. Press the knob on the back and voilá: The steampunk desk lamp is ready.