Repurposing Designs

Here’s a short look at how we’ve taken parts from prototypes and repurposed them or taken a basic design and tried to see what else we can do with it.

The body of the Empire Lamp prototype we made several years ago is supposed to be made from a length of a custom extrusion profile that we were looking at having made. Making the extrusion is quite expensive and is only suitable for production, so, for the purposes of the prototype, we decided to mimic the form by having several shorter sections of the profile made that were then pressed together with dowel pins. (In the production world, these bodies would be made from long sections of 8-12’ that would then be sawed and finished to the desired length.)

We were left with several extra sections beyond what was needed to construct the two prototypes, so we pressed a few together to make a small vase. The brass ring structure inside is meant to hold the stems in place.

A second “exploration” of seeing what else we could do with an existing design involved trying to turn the Votive olders from the Brass Family of objects into an oil lamp. The extension holding the wick was telescoping and could be changed in height, but the length of the wick was just too long and the lamp oil would not move up the length to keep the flame lit. We could probably revisit this and try a shorter length at some point.

The final example was a lucky break. Our coaster bodies just happen to fit around the lip of this 8” frosted glass globe that we used for our Area Lamp. The fit was perfect- how often do things like that work out? All that was required was putting in four screws holes and larger through hole for the wiring and we had our globe base.