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Mission lamp
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This Mission-style lamp with a wooden base and shade has "heirloom" written all over it
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By Michel Roy, photos by Martin Tessler, illustration by Len Churchill
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Elegant and functional, this lamp and shade take many notes from the design schools of Arts and Crafts.
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You can make a big impact with a small amount of wood by building this lamp. As you build, you'll master some important techniques, including working with small parts precisely.
Virtually any species of hardwood works structurally for this project. I made mine from quartersawn white oak, true to Mission design, but it would look great in cherry, walnut or mahogany too.
Shade Your Eyes
There are three components to this lamp: the shade, the base and the wiring. Start with the shade. It has four frame panels, each mitred along the corners and glued together. Some shop-built clamps and a jig, plus a technique taken from the stained-glass trade, will help you complete these panels.
Begin by milling the thin strips needed for the shade-bottoms, diagonals and tops. They're 3/8" thick x 3/4" wide. Mill a 3/16"-deep x 1/4"-wide rabbet for the glass on one edge of all strips. You can do this with a table-mounted router, a dado blade or even two passes with a regular blade in a tablesaw.
Be careful. Working with material this thin requires additional fences, pushsticks and featherboards to keep fingers away from the saw blade.
Next, cut the pieces to length at the correct angles. Use a mitre saw or mitre gauge on your tablesaw, fitted with an auxiliary fence. It's important to set up a stop block so all identical pieces are exactly the same length. Set your mitre gauge 55º on the scale, then cut one end of each shade strip. Flip the stock, or reset the gauge, then saw the other ends to the correct length.
Join the corners of the frames by milling a 3/16"-deep rabbet on the ends of the horizontal members to fit into the rabbets you cut into the diagonal pieces. You'll end up with a sort of half-lap tongue joint. These rabbets must also be cut to match the angled ends.
Now that you have your shade parts, you need to glue them up into four frames. See “Borrowed Idea” on page 51 for tips on this tricky step.
With your four identical frames built, you need to bevel the corners where they meet. For this job, you need your tablesaw and a simple jig.
Set the tablesaw blade to 30º from square, then use a piece of plywood about 11" x 14" as a sled. Nail a thin strip of wood to the ply to act as a fence, parallel with the outside edge of the wood.
The photo above shows how this jig holds the frame edge flush with the sled edge.
Next, set the tablesaw fence so the blade just cuts the top outside corners of the diagonal lampshade parts. Creep up on this fence setting with a few experimental passes. Once the set-up is correct, bevel all the diagonal sides and try a test fit. Use masking tape to hold everything together.
Finally, set the blade to 30º from square and, using your bevelling jig, trim back the bottom members of the shade frames as shown in the plans. You can wait until the shade support-arm assembly is ready to do a test fit.
With your frames complete, you need to assemble the shade. I made custom clamps to help this process. See the plans at right for details.
To complete the glue-up, lay out all four shade frames flat on your workbench, with outside surfaces facing up. Assemble three of the four mitres, with the fourth remaining open. Apply and burnish a strip of masking tape down the entire length of each closed joint. This acts as a hinge when you pull the joints together, and will keep glue squeeze-out off the face of the frame. On the open joint, apply pieces of tape to either side to keep the glue off when you close it up. Flip the whole assembly over, so the inside is facing up, then apply glue to the joints. When you're done, simply close each joint in turn until they all meet properly. Apply your clamps until the glue sets.
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