1930s Desk Lamp - Restoration
- 2 years ago
In this video I'm restoring a very stylish German desk lamp from the 1930's. This model is called „Vitalux Type G101“ made by „Osram“. Vitalux lamps always had UV bulps. They were advertised as healthy lamps back in the 30's to get your vitamin D at home.
My friend has found this lamp at the local junk yard. I really liked its design, so I bought it for $25. To be honest I first thought this should be a quick and easy project. Sure, to get the reflector back to shape would be challenging, but the rest should be pretty straight forward. How wrong I was! It took me 26 days in the workshop to complete this project.
It was really tricky to get the reflector back to shape. Thanks to my two sheet metal specialist friends I was able to achieve a nearly perfect result. Getting the bead back to a consistent shape was very difficult, but with some thinking we came up with a very clever tool design which worked like a charm. The rest was just sanding. At first I tried to make a mirror polish on the inside. As I couldn't achieve a satisfying result I went with a satin brushed finish instead, which turned out looking amazing in my opinion.
Creating a new logo was another big challenge. Waterslide decals were out of question because of the „TYPE G101“ text below the logo. So I wanted to spray paint the logo with a sticker template cut with the vinyl cutter, but the tiny size of the letters won't let me get a clean and sharp result after removing the template sticker. Then I tried it the other way around and cut a golden vinyl and used the logo itself as a permanent sticker, which worked very well and looked super sharp. I applied two coats of 2K clear coat to seal the sticker.
On the wooden piece I applied a acrylic primer as base, which had very good coverage and saturated well, so the 2K paint was nice and easy to apply. I picked a satin jet black, it's a mix between matte and glossy.
The old nickel plating was already coming off on some parts, so I removed the old plating, polished them all again and plated them new.
I have found a very nice old school looking power cord with fabric insulated twisted wires, together with an antique Bakelite switch it was the perfect combination.
Overall I'm very happy how the lamp has turned out. All the different finishes and colors match very nice togehter. The light ivory painted parts with the silver on the inside and the golden logo, the black painted wood, the nice and shiny reflector and the freshly polished and nickel plated parts.
I hope you like my work and the video.
My friend has found this lamp at the local junk yard. I really liked its design, so I bought it for $25. To be honest I first thought this should be a quick and easy project. Sure, to get the reflector back to shape would be challenging, but the rest should be pretty straight forward. How wrong I was! It took me 26 days in the workshop to complete this project.
It was really tricky to get the reflector back to shape. Thanks to my two sheet metal specialist friends I was able to achieve a nearly perfect result. Getting the bead back to a consistent shape was very difficult, but with some thinking we came up with a very clever tool design which worked like a charm. The rest was just sanding. At first I tried to make a mirror polish on the inside. As I couldn't achieve a satisfying result I went with a satin brushed finish instead, which turned out looking amazing in my opinion.
Creating a new logo was another big challenge. Waterslide decals were out of question because of the „TYPE G101“ text below the logo. So I wanted to spray paint the logo with a sticker template cut with the vinyl cutter, but the tiny size of the letters won't let me get a clean and sharp result after removing the template sticker. Then I tried it the other way around and cut a golden vinyl and used the logo itself as a permanent sticker, which worked very well and looked super sharp. I applied two coats of 2K clear coat to seal the sticker.
On the wooden piece I applied a acrylic primer as base, which had very good coverage and saturated well, so the 2K paint was nice and easy to apply. I picked a satin jet black, it's a mix between matte and glossy.
The old nickel plating was already coming off on some parts, so I removed the old plating, polished them all again and plated them new.
I have found a very nice old school looking power cord with fabric insulated twisted wires, together with an antique Bakelite switch it was the perfect combination.
Overall I'm very happy how the lamp has turned out. All the different finishes and colors match very nice togehter. The light ivory painted parts with the silver on the inside and the golden logo, the black painted wood, the nice and shiny reflector and the freshly polished and nickel plated parts.
I hope you like my work and the video.