Floor Lamp Height vs. Reach: Plumbing Fitting

Update: Welcome Adafruit! The reshaped elbow shown here eventually got threaded adapters for the tubing and an awful paint job.

The floor lamp with the invisible / non-tactile controls moved to a different chair, where it didn’t have quite enough reach and too much height. Knowing what was about to happen, I spliced a JST-SM connector into the wire inside the tube:

After trimming off all the extraneous bits, the larger half of the connector (male pins) fits through the tubing and the smaller half (female sockets) barely fits through the bottom bushings.

It turns out half-inch copper pipe fittings (ID = 15.9 mm) almost exactly fit the tubing (OD = 15.7 mm):

A quick test showed the 45° (actually, it’s 135°, but we’re deep into plumbing nomenclature) positioned the lamp head too high and with too much reach:

So shorten the tube attached to the head and deburr the cut:

The 45° fitting is too high and a 90° fitting is obviously too low, so cut a 20° slice out of a 90° fitting:

Cut a snippet of brass tubing to fit, bash to fit, file to hide, buff everything to a high shine, silver-solder it in place, and buff everything again:

The 5/8 inch aluminum rods serve to stiffen the fitting, smooth out the torch heating, and generally keep things under control.

Wrap the obligatory Kapton tape around the butt ends of the tubes to fill the fitting’s oversize hole, put everything together, and it’s just about perfect:

I immobilized the fitting with black Gorilla tape, but it really needs something a bit more permanent. One of these days, maybe, a pair of setscrews will happen.

The additional reach required a little more counterweight on the far side for security, so I added the broken stub of a truck leaf spring. It should be secured firmly to the base plate, but no tool I own can put a dent in those three pounds of spring steel. Maybe it’ll merit a fancy enclosure wrapped around the base?