Laminated Cedar Spiral Lamp from Two 2x4's

welcome back to make build modify I'm Justin and today I'm going to be building a spiral lamp made from two two by fours this is for the two two by four challenge put on by Mike Chris and Ben at the modern maker podcast so I had the idea to build a lamp with an eight inch diameter and a 48 inch height and I wanted to see what a single rotation of lamination would look like around that so I drew this scale drawing using parallel line development to kind of get an idea of what the curves would look like together so you can see the three independent laminated curves in this drawing here I also wanted to get an idea of what scale might look like and I use the golden ratio to establish the height of the shade versus the overall height of the lamp and you'll see as the video progresses that I kind of deviate from this drawing a little bit I ended up extending the feet down below the base a little bit more and I used thicker materials than these curves are relative to the proportions of this drawing so these are two cedar eight foot two by fours and I chose cedar because I know it's a very flexible species and here I'm I'm cutting off the ends that will end up being the discs of the lamp and I did the math so that I had about sixty inches left and I knew that that would make it around that spiral in this shot here I'm just removing little strips of the 2x4 and that drop is what I'm going to use to laminate I'm just checking to see if it seems like a little banding it does and right here I'm measuring it to see what one-third will be for each spiral this is a trick for marking a straight line on a tube and I need to do this because I'm going to use what they call a rollout pattern so we draw a straight line on this paper and align the line from the tube up to it I'm going to do one full rotation and find the point where one full rotation is on that paper and you see I drew a diagonal I'm going to cut that and when I roll this around that tube it's going to create the spiral you'll see in a moment okay now I'm just going to use tape to follow that line and the tape is going to be my pattern location that way I can remove the paper get it out of my way so I just used regular wood glue and you can see how flexible these are and this was an experiment I didn't know if I was going to work out or not this was all trial and error I wasn't even sure if these rubber bands banding it together it was a good idea but you got to start somewhere you can see I have more tape on the tube now I was going to I plan to laminate all three at the same time but once I started negotiating this around the two became very obvious that was only going to have the the time to do one per lamination so I had to go out and get a couple more tubes and this is the other part of the experiment I didn't I didn't have the appropriate clamps and tubes or the cardboard tube is flexible so I decided that I'm just going to use rubber bands just a lot of rubber bands and I was surprised at how well this work it moves around a little bit when you're first starting but as you get more and more advanced it's really easy to control the location of that spiral so you can see the glue like squeezing out it really clamped it well as I was cutting these they occurred to me that I'm pretty sure this is the most rubber bands I've cut in one day it was an absurd amount of rubber bands curved look like it turned out great okay sanding this was a trick I realized pretty quickly when I started running this over the belt sander dit there's only one point where this can contact the belt and be parallel to the belt and you have to constantly be changing that to get it to land on the edge of that drum and sand everything appropriately so it took a little bit of practice in this shot here I'm lining up the spiral back on the tube to use the tube as a miter guide I want these legs to sit flat on the floor and Justin feeling these real way that I could find to get the angle for the future so I took the spiral pieces over to the sander to clean up my cuts and this was actually a lot easier than I thought it would be just line up the edges and just dust off the end of it a little bit and the laminations looking really cool when I cut the blocks for what would be the discs of the lamp I chose the locations of the two-by-fours that had the Wayne in them and I knew I was going to rip these down to about an inch and it would take most of the way off so that was part of my initial selection process I also have to take these blocks through the table saw the other direction to create a square edge so I don't have a jointer so I just used the table saw so after this trip through the planer here I'm going to run back through and basically joint them this was a pretty straightforward glue up I chose the grain to align up and make some pretty good patterns this one for example has dark in the center and light on the edges that that looks pretty cool so I kind of did that with all three glue ups just tried to make it look good [Music] so there's a lot of planning and a lot of sanding on these disks I'm going to try to keep it short and not show too much of it but suffice to say there was a lot of labour here's a trick mark the grit number with a sharpie on your hook and loop pads because the factory print gets covered by the sawdust and it's easier to see what grid it is later so I'm just marking center here and draw an outline so that I can cut these on the bandsaw I noticed while cutting circles if you keep the center of the circle 90 degrees to the blade and try to keep that from moving throughout the process it's a lot easier to cut a circle and then I just finished up the edges with my disc sander here these disks need marks that are 120 degrees apart you kind of see the drawing I have on the table that is to locate those marks each set of marks is the same on each disk but as they climb up the lamp those positions change relative to the spiral that's climbing up the lamp if that makes any sense here I'm just drilling holes for the copper pipe that's going to go up through the bottom two disks that will make room for the cord and hold the bulb of the lamp I wanted to quickly sand the copper pipe and quick way to do that is to check it into your drill but the Chuck's of my drills are too small to hold that copper so I made this I guess wooden mandrel to hold that copper pipe so I can kind of just swedge it on there and then sand it I use a little bit of hot glue to help this is just a clear coat to keep the copper from oxidizing I really wanted to show the process of aligning these spirals without taking up too much time this I think - maybe about an hour and a half for me to get these stood up and aligned in the appropriate location where they could receive fasteners heating them standing there's easy but getting them to the exact location and have them aligned on each disk appropriately is a pretty difficult task to fasten these I used my Cregg pocket hole jig drill bit and some of the screws without course theater the jig itself just just by hand you can see I use tape to establish the depth of the drill to make plugs for those holes I used one of my punch set pieces in the drill to cut native wood I was really surprised how well that worked I'm aligning these plugs with a grain going parallel to the disks just to add a little contrast and I also chose a darker color so they stand out after it gets finished this is just a wipe on stain and you let it set and then wipe it off a little while later another time-consuming part of the process I also ended up doing a clear coat on the lamp this is the wiring for the lamp it's a very straightforward process this is a cord that I purchased at a local big-box store and I just took the end off so I could fish it through the pipe and I've got a little additional piece of copper here to stand off the bulb away from the first disc there and I just put the pieces back together the way they came apart about a year ago I took a part of couple plasma TVs and just behind the front screen there are some sheets of vellum like material and that's what you're seeing here I think they're diffusers but they they work well for a lot of different things masking or even just diffusing light for shooting photography and things like that and I thought this might be perfect for a lampshade so what I'm doing there is I'm using the same piece of paper I used to get to the spiral tape location on the tube to find a place to cut the seam so that when it goes into the lamp the seam is hidden behind the spiral lamination and I'm using that same location on the table with the 120 degree marks to find the next seam because the seam doesn't line up right on top of itself it has there's actually two locations in this wrap because it goes past one full wrap so I hit both of those locations behind those laminations I got to say I'm really pleased with the way this one turned out I never thought that laminating with rubber bands on a cardboard tube would produce such a good result I've got a list of tools and materials in the description and if you enjoyed the video please consider subscribing have a good day

Channel: Make Build Modify

Views: 1,931,948

Rating: 4.948658 out of 5

Keywords: 2x4, floorlamp, laminated, laminate, cedar, lamp, spiral, modern, modern maker podcast, two 2x4 challenge, spiral staircase, spiral lamination, woodworking, woodgrain, woodshop, wood working, carpentry, glue up, wood glue, round lamp

Id: CZYgMgfDj7o

Length: 14min 4sec (844 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 01 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Stephen_Netu]

This was astounding. And a very well paced video, to boot!

[u/not_so_serious]

This approach to maker videos is my favorite: thoughtful narration over the stop-motion so that we get to see nearly everything but there's no tedium. Very nice!

[u/Wang_entity]

Wow. Just wow.

What a beautiful lamp! Loved the editing and very relaxed style of it.

[u/Soggy_Stargazer]

Really cool build and incredible production value.

Well done.

[u/realpisawork]

Great relaxing narration and stop motion video was perfect.

[u/[deleted]]

This is awesome. Was that you OP?

Edit- I think it might look a bit better if you lit it more evenly with a tall vertical bulb. Fluorescent maybe?

[u/fietsusa]

if it had a ring base flush with the spiral, and you hid the chord in the spiral, eliminating the copper, it could be nice.

spiral is elegant, other parts are clunky.

[u/zyzzogeton]

kudos to the creator for a well produced video. That was just the right speed to show this. The design isn't to my taste, but I absolutely applaud the excellence in execution of your vision. This is a beautiful piece... and an interesting and provocative entry into the 2x2x4 competition.

[u/twodogsfighting]

You can actually re-use rubber bands though.