Son of FrånkenLämp

When I finished with FrånkenLämp, there were a few useful parts left over.

Namely, there were two bulbs left from the TIVED. I decided to put these to good use. My workbench could use a little more light.

I started by taping the two light stalks together at the base. I just used electrical tape at first. You can see the wiring coming out of the ends.

Note the black resistor attached to one of the wires. It is important to keep this in the circuit, depending on how you set it up.

The original lamp had a 12.5 volt power supply. This fed three bulbs in series. So each bulb requires about four volts. If you have a 12 volt power supply, you will need to keep the resistor in series with the two remaining bulbs to avoid running them at too high a voltage.

If you have an 8 volt power supply, you don't need to use the resistor. You could just wire the two bulbs in series.

If you have a 4 volt power supply, you don't need the resistor either. You could wire the two bulbs in parallel.

Since I only had a 12 volt power supply handy, I stuck with the resistor.


After soldering the wiring, the next thing I did was to cover the electrical tape and loose wires with heat shrink. This will prevent the electrical tape from unraveling over time and becoming a sticky mess. Heat shrink is much nicer than electrical tape, in my opinion. In the picture below, you can see the section of heat shrink that I slid onto the stalks before taping them together.











And here you can see the result after shrinking. Note that I cut the piece of heat shrink in half so it could cover both taped areas. The wiring and resistor are nicely contained by the heat shrink at the end.













I used a spare molex connector (stolen from a broken compter case fan). This made it very easy to use the 12 volt output of my handy bench power supply. It is probably a temporary solution until I can find a 12 volt wall wort to replace it with.


I attached the lamp to the underside of a wire shelf that sits next to my workbench. I used tie wraps to hold it in place. Then I ran temporary power to it, as you can see below.




Here is the final result.

The bulbs put out a decent amount of light, and the angle is just perfect to illuminate what I am working on without getting in the way. It clears up the useful work space that was taken up by my previous lamp.

 Not bad for leftover parts and pieces.