Lamp Shades

This started out as one of those relaxing weekend projects. I actually had a day to do some woodworking for myself instead of for clients. The lamp shades on a couple of our floor lamps had been damaged in a move, so I thought I’d spend an afternoon building new shades.

Recently, several installations have required me to do some cutting with handsaws. I found that my handsaw skills were a little rusty, so I thought the lampshades would be a perfect project for some handsaw practice. While I was at it, I decided not to calculate and measure every cut, and instead used a story stick and bevel gauge.

Cutting the pieces to length and cutting the angled half-laps went pretty well, but took a lot longer than I had expected. I don’t know where my good back-saw wandered off to, so I used a small pull-saw. The cutting would have been faster and the joints would have been tighter if I had used the right saw. I glued up the eight little frames and was pleased with how well the pieces went together – not perfect, but like I said – my handsaw skills are a little rusty, and I wasn’t really using the right saw. Eight panels means 32 joints – further evidence that you can never have too many clamps.

The afternoon was shot, so I left the parts in glue-up and returned to them the next day. Of course, by then the glue squeeze-out was set up, and had to be removed from all the nooks and crannies with a card scraper and a chisel. Once the glue was off, I routed a recess for the panels and cut the bevel for the frames to attach to each other and glued them up. I cleaned off that glue and slopped on some Black Walnut Danish Oil. The fabric panels were cut out of the old lampshades (one yellow and one blue-grey) and attached in the recesses with 23ga pins.

I tried to use the hardware out of the old lampshades, but both of them broke, so I fabricated an “X” out of ¼” BB ply to attach the shade to the lamp.

This relaxing, afternoon project wound up stretching out to a little over eight hours! Still, it was a fun diversion, and I got to practice some skills I don’t use often.

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