Pimping my pole.

  • Hey Guest, Early bird pricing on the Summer Moot (29th July - 10th August) available until April 6th, we'd love you to come. PLEASE CLICK HERE to early bird price and get more information.

Wayland

Hárbarðr
Baker-Tent-Pole.jpg



I made a point at the Steam Tent Craft Weekend about how useful it is to be multi disciplinary when working with crafts.

This is a good example of what I meant.

I wanted to pimp the tent poles at the front of the Baker tent a bit.

A lamp hanger was an obvious choice but I wanted somewhere to hang other bits and pieces as well.

Crafts involved: wood work, metal work, leather work, rope work and a good bit of salvaging and bodging.

The leather and brass hanger is based on tent pole hangers from the turn of the last century. They used hooks but as it is in an area where people frequently walk past I thought the cleats might be less bothersome.

It needed something to hold it in place and as it's height is sort of dictated by not wanting to interfere with the lantern, I thought a fixed length of cod line with two needle whipped eye spices would do the job.

The lamp hanger was salvaged from a broken coat rail with a hook from an old curtain tie back.

The lamp hanger pins through the pole with a bit of old wire tent peg. I've drilled all four upright poles so it doesn't matter which ever pole is at the open corner.
 

Wayland

Hárbarðr
I'm not a movie maker but I thought you might be interested to see what I've put together using a USB charged Flame Effect Bulb.

http://www.steamtent.uk/assets/multimedia/LED-Lantern-540.mp4

I picked up the lantern for 50p on a boot sale and I've drilled the base so that the switch can be accessed there.

It runs for a little under 6 hours on a full charge and recharges with a standard USB power source.

End effect is quite atmospheric I think and completely tent safe of course.

It has one of these inside it:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/.../7W-USB-LED.../113730044257...

No connection and other vendors are available of course.

The base of the lantern is drilled to 28mm so the whole of the switch/ charging port drops through the bottom.

( I spray painted the white plastic on mine black so it blended in a bit better.)
 
  • Like
Reactions: Keith_Beef

Keith_Beef

Native
Sep 9, 2003
1,366
268
55
Yvelines, north-west of Paris, France.
Got to give it to the Chinese, it doesn't take them long to pinch an idea and make it cheaper.

But what I resent is when companies tout their products as being "Designed by [some European name or other]" and as being "Made in Europe", and charging an arm and a leg for what is essentially just an injection moulded piece of plastic that I could get made for £5 if I were to order two hundred of them, with a £5 Chinese component inside.

Lets imagine that I paid the designer £5000 for the design. I order 1000 pieces from an injection moulding company in the UK. I order 1000 of the Chinese 7W USB Flickering Flame units at £5 each, including shipping. Assembling the things might cost £20 an hour (salary plus employer's contribution) to assemble them at one every ten seconds. Total cost for 1000 units is £5000 (design) + £5000 (injection moulding) + £5000 (Flickering Flame units) + £60 (three hours of labour), total £15060 for 1000 finished lamps is £15.06 a piece. Add on 30% mark-up for the shop makes about £20, VAT at 20% makes the selling price £21, approximately €24. So the difference between €24 and the €70 my OH paid seems to be a nice pocketful of change for M. Fermob: €46 per lamp!

I'm in the wrong line of work, I think.
 

Bishop

Full Member
Jan 25, 2014
1,716
691
Pencader
I'm not a movie maker but I thought you might be interested to see what I've put together using a USB charged Flame Effect Bulb.

http://www.steamtent.uk/assets/multimedia/LED-Lantern-540.mp4
That's a top hole bit of Techno-Bodgery sir!

PS:
To salve the concerns of anybody suffering from a crisis of faith that light emitting diodes aka LED's are not Steampunk. In 1907 a gentleman by the name of Henry J Round wrote to the Electrical World magazine describing how carborundum crystals could be made to produce light when a voltage was applied to them. Off-topic yet fascinating article by H.P. Friedrichs can be found
here
 

BCUK Shop

We have a a number of knives, T-Shirts and other items for sale.

SHOP HERE