A Floor Lamp Made From Household Trash

"Trash" are everywhere around us. Thrown-away hockey sticks in my neighborhood inspired me to make use of them. I used three sticks to make the spine of this floor lamp. They are old, but they can hold, and they make the lamp shine gold.

Around us old/broken hockey sticks are easy to find, and I picked three of them. The rest of needed materials are: a broken bike helmet and a roll of aluminum duct sealing tape, a broken laminated lock, 4 pieces of steel "beams" from an old kids' construction toy kit, a broken table lamp, a paper food jar, and 3 "L" shape screws plus 3 used-up color ball pens. The tools needed are very commonly of: screwdriver, plier, scissors, cutting knife, hand saw, hammer and chisel.

To bind them together I made nine(9) steel binding pieces out of a broken laminated lock. I used a hammer and a chisel to break the lock's clamp pins and got enough ring-type pieces as shown in Fig 1(figures are numbered by their show-up order). Then I sawed a slot 30 degree into a piece of wood, and used it as a template to bend each binding piece in a 120 degree angle(Fig 2). Fastened into wood with screws, these angled binding pieces are perfect to bind the three sticks together at three places along the stick's length(Fig 3, 4). This way the stand of the lamp is made.

I found a broken bike helmet, sawed out its broken part on its brim, and adhere aluminum duct tape to all over the inside of the helmet. This made the helmet a well-reflective lampshade. Next, I took four pieces of steel beams from an old construction toy kit(Fig 7), and disassembled an old table lamp to get necessary electric parts like a wire cord, a lamp socket and its base plate(Fig 8). Then I bent the beams to fit them between the shade and the base plate, and used screws to assemble all components into a whole section(Fig 9) atop the lamp, with the cord coming from the bottom just through the slot in the middle of the bound three sticks(Fig 10).

Before I assembled the top section, I also did something else. I cut a paper food jars into two cylinders(Fig 11) and found a similar one in different color(Fig 12). I put them through the stick stand before assembling the top section(otherwise I wouldn't be able to put them in), and using screws I mounted each of them just around where the sticks are bound with steel angles(Fig 13, 14) to cover the hardware, avoiding uncomfortable toughing them and providing a bit of decoration. After that, I took three plastic "half-tube" parts from used-up color ball pens and using "L" shape screws(Fig 15) to add three small hangers to the top cylinder(Fig 16). Finally, I used hand drill to carve "LETS UPCYCLE" on the lampshade to finish this project. I didn't buy anything new throughout the whole project making process. All materials were found at hand and made improvised use of.