Lamp Base from Plywood

Last year we made a round stacked plywood lamp base and it turned out awesome. I’ve been thinking about it lately and decided we really needed two of them.

We tossed around ideas for the shape and thought about building the other base oval. After some more thought we settled on square. I wanted them to be made of the same material but looking different from each other.

Once in the workshop with a fire in the wood stove, Jim set about cutting the squares on the table saw. We had measured the bottom of the round lamp and decided on 6 1/2 inches for the squares.

We counted the layers on the round lamp and then we cut out 12 squares plus 2 smaller ones for the top.

We stacked them all up and I took them into the house to see how it looked with the lamp shade. Its a good thing too because after seeing it with the shade and next to the round base I decided it was way too big.

Back to the workshop to break the news to Jim that all of the squares needed to be trimmed. We decided to take an inch of two of the sides. So glad we did.

For the top piece we set the table saw to a 45 degree angle and trimmed all four sides.

Here is how it looked so far.

After finding the center of each square…

It was time to drill a hole in each one for the wire to go through.

Each square was glued and then nailed together.

Now for the fun part, depending on who you ask.

Actually it didn’t take all that long. Again, depending on who you ask.

We placed the two smaller blocks on top with glue and nails after we threaded the wire through the whole base.

And that folks is how you make your own lamps using plywood.

If you make a plywood base lamp, be sure to show us.

Later