Fiberglass Lamp

Here's one of the projects I finished for my Materials class this semester.

This one took so much of my time and money to finish. There have been some problems in building this, and the professor kept telling me to fix them. I am just grateful that I did not fail this, but this was just too difficult and it is a miracle that I finished it in time.

The finished lamp is made of of fiberglass, but before casting the lamp, I needed to make a clay model that could be divided into segments which would be connected again later, and separate plaster molds of each segment. Fiberglass is actually made of fibermat, resin and a few other chemicals that make the resin hard and thick.

I needed to cover the plaster molds with the fiberglass materials, and then break the plaster so I could get the fiberglass parts. After those parts were dried and separated from the plaster, I needed to stick them together with a mixture of resin and another chemical that made the mixture thick. The professor then said the textures on my lamp weren't visible enough, so I needed to carve out some parts of the lamp with a chisel and a screwdriver to add more texture.

As soon as I took care of that, I needed to create the light source. Basically, I just connected a wire to a plug on one end then a light bulb on the other end. There was also supposed to be a switch in the middle, but I didn't have time to install the switch. The bulb obviously was inserted inside the lamp and that's when I was finally done.