Furniture & Lighting

The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for making furniture and home decor for every room in the house, including the garage.

Beautiful plumbing pipe lamps

Beautiful plumbing pipe lamps

These “Kozo” handmade iron-pipe lamps from Israeli group Demo Design Clinic first appeared on my radar back in early 2009 when Boing Boing blogged about their original model, the kozo1, pictured top left. They were a runaway success, and Kozo has since added many more models. They’ve got a clever trick for building the switch into a faucet handle to match the spot-on DIY aesthetics of the lamp itself. Gareth blogged a pretty sweet remake, minus the fancy switch, by a reader named Boris shortly thereafter.

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Radially expanding and contracting table

Radially expanding and contracting table

Some observations: The table top pieces are only truly circular in their larger arrangement. In the “contracted” table, the 6 wedges in fact form a kind of rounded-off hexagon, and the outer table edge is made circular by the rotating rim, which has a complementary inner profile. Besides the wedges, there are two other types of pieces that make up the table top–6 “darts” having two parallel sides that rise to fill the spaces between the wedges, and the “star” (a dodecagram, in fact) that rises up in the middle. The table is locked in either configuration by one or more threaded detents which are quite clearly shown in the upper video.

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A sawhorse to write home about

I’ve mentioned my friends Scott Constable and Ene Osteraas-Constable on the CRAFT blog before, and Scott’s recent post about the ideal characteristics of the venerable sawhorse, along with a photo of some beautiful “indoor sawhorses” he’s made seemed like good fodder for a mention here. Scott writes: To me, there’s also something inherently a little […]

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Beautiful overengineered tape dispenser

Beautiful overengineered tape dispenser

There’s a great thing that happens, every so often, when people have access to machine tools: They go a little bit nuts. They’re bumping along one day, doing what they do, and some mundane object crosses them for the last time. This or that thing never works as well as it should, or breaks too easily, or gets misplaced once too often, and it occurs to them: Hey, I could fix that–and not just for myself, for today or for the next couple of weeks or months, but for the rest of my natural life and possibly those of my descendants for the foreseeable future of the species. And something like this solid 6061 aluminum Scotch tape dispenser from Henry Herndon is the result. The sea may be vast, our boats may be small and constantly buffeted by the gales of an indifferent universe ruled by a howling demon of entropy, but that Scotch-tape-dispenser-problem is fixed now, by God. On to the next thing.

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