Sometimes it’s not about a complex, clever project. Sometimes it’s just about pulling off a quick fix.
The lovely standing lamp by the sewing table at NYCR had come off of its base, and the threads on the tube at the bottom had stripped out completely. Since it had never really been used elsewhere, a mounting bracket for the sewing table seemed appropriate. FreeCAD is terrific for whipping up parametric designs like this, and the Fasteners workbench let me drop in the hardware and ensure the design would work with parts we had on hand.
Through the magic of spare filament and a working 3D printer, the bracket materialized in under an hour. I spent most of that time looking for M5 hardware to bolt it down with. (I really need to organize our metric hardware better.)
And it works! Bolted to the table like this, the lamp doesn’t sway as much as it did when it was standing on the floor, and it illuminates the table perfectly. I made one big design mistake, though: the nut that the clamping bolt threads to was inserted through a slot that goes through the bottom of the bracket. That means that if the clamping bolt is removed completely, the nut will drop to the bottom of the slot, and we’ll need to unbolt the bracket to fix it. Oops.
But that can be a quick fix for another day.
