The Titan Floor Lamp

[Mattgyver92]

I'm building a big 'ole floor height lava lamp. I've dubbed the design: The Titan. I wanted something a little more sinister looking than your typical retro futurist chrome rocket, so I slimmed down the features to homage a missile with a warhead. See above for the design.

After plenty of research on here, a generic glass floor vase would not be suitable for the globe for this project due to the more intense temperature bulb required to create a temperature gradient of the height this would need to actually flow. It would literally shatter.

I ordered a globe from Adams & Chittenden in CA. to get a custom borosilicate heat resistant globe made. The glass they offer has a linear coefficient of expansion of 32.7 x 10-7 cm/cm/deg.C. for those who need that detail. A 120mm x 500mm vessel with a 5ml plate bottom and 80mm opening ended up setting me back just shy of $300- or about the cost of a new Mathmos lamp.

With borosilicate lava globe in hand, I can now finalize the dimensions for the lamp itself. As for the color I plan to make in this, I'm definitely thinking of a red fluid with either white, yellow, or orange lava. Something fiery color for sure.....like a mushroom cloud. :)

Lamp design itself will likely be like all my others- made from concrete. It's easy to print molds for it, cheap to buy, and doesn't seem to mind the heat from the bulb. Stand will be wood. I'll likely make blanks to use as a router guide and likely use two .5" sheets of plywood to make each part. Also, I definitely needed to include a neon flickering candelabra bulb at the bottom for a rocket booster to fully sell the look. I figured you'd understand.

I'll post another update soon once I've finalized my CAD and begun printing molds.

Cheers,

Matt

[Claude J]

Very Cool concept and executiuon 

[tim]

Looks really cool, you always have the most creative lava lamp concepts!

My vote would be for red liquid with yellow wax because the red liquid would make it look orangeish and the color would shift as it moves through the globe.

[Autumn]

Very cool design. I like it.

[KirkS]

The drawing  is as cool as the lamp!

I would be concerned about long term availability of the bulbs. You are probably going to be buried with this lamp> seems like using a nice higher end heating element that is dimmable  and then using LED lighting would be a long term set up.