Oak Lamp Glows Bright

Looking for a way to spruce up your place with a touch of rustic-future-deco? Why not embed LEDs somewhere they were never designed for? [Callosciurini] had a nice chunk of oak and decided to turn it into a lamp.

He was inspired by a similar lamp that retails for over $1,000, so he figured he would make his own instead (business idea people?). The oak is a solid chunk measuring 40x40x45cm and what he did was route out an angled channel across all faces of the cube. This allowed him to installed a simple LED strip inside the groove — then he filled it with an epoxy/paint mix to give it that milky glow.

To finish it off he sanded the entire thing multiple times, oiled the wood, and sanded it again with a very fine grit. The result is pretty awesome.

Now imagine what you could do design-wise if you could fold wood to make a lamp? Well with this custom wood-folding saw-blade, the sky is the limit!

[via r/DIY]

29 thoughts on “Oak Lamp Glows Bright

    1. This. Also, having a bright LED strip to have to avoid looking at would get very annoying after a while. Better to have the lights in a hollow underneath, and place the block on a narrow, white/clear stand. It would work like a standard table lamp (indirect lighting = good), plus appear to float! (Granted, cord management might be difficult and/or spoil the illusion…)

    1. The best LEDs have much shorter lifetime because they’re using secondary phosphors akin to a CFL to fill in the gaps in the spectrum, and the phosphors degrade much faster than the diodes.

      Plain LEDs have awful awful, completely horrible color rendering indices. Get a color comparison chart, a cheap LED bulb/strip, a halogen bulb, switch between the two and watch half the colors become indistinguishable from each other when the “white” LED is on.

    2. Only rarely do I see a LED fail, and if it happens it’s a LED lamp, and that probably is because of ineffective cooling or the driving circuit going bust, again because of poor cooling.
      So that brings up a point, how do these LED hold up being encased in a thick layer of epoxy on one side and thick wood on the other?

      But anyway, having some of them fail randomly might make this light even more interesting.

    1. I know right? It’s like when newspapers and TV stations report on the same thing, I mean, don’t they know the other guys already reported on it? Should we really have to bother scrolling past things we’ve already seen? That’s such bullshit, wasting my time.

    1. 40x40x45 cm is 30.5 board feet (a board foot is one twelfth of a cubic foot, a common unit for lumber). In my area, thick, wide, rough-sawn oak planks are around $6 per board foot, so I’d expect to pay at least $185 for such a block.

      Free if you’re good with a chain saw and know someone with an oak tree that needs to come down.

        1. Yes, ikea have a fake natural finished wood table that is actually MDF with veneer. I had to look quite closely to spot the seems. I only notice because the showroom one had a big gouge.

  1. Buncha’ city slickers wondering how much a piece of wood that size would cost…

    There are these things called forests, see. And if you get up close to them you’ll discover they’re filled with these things called trees. Trees are made of wood, but they also make wood. It’s a little hard to understand, but thinks of trees as giant (very altruistic) 3D printers.

    Most trees are standing up and pointing toward that blue thing (it’s blue out here, it might be gray where you live). We call that the sky. But sometimes trees get really tired and take forever naps. Then they’re on their sides, on the ground. It’s easiest to cut blocks of wood out of those napping trees. They don’t mind, and they won’t usually injure you in the process of extracting the wood.

    You use these sharp pointy things called saws to cut wood from trees. Only cut the tree though. Saws and human flesh don’t mix, unless you’re hunting zombies but that’s different. There are a few intermediate steps involving drying the wood and removing the bark or shaping the wood, but those are straightforward. Once you’ve done that, you have pieces of wood that you can create things with. And nature gives them to you for free. It’s amazing, really.

      1. That would be soapstone. Just about any woodworking tool also works soapstone. You can carve it with a knife, shape it with a router, even use a chainsaw to make sculptures. Fascinating stuff.

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