I’m finally building a 5 bulb Edison lamp out of walnut. I’ve been wanting to do a walnut version for a while now, and thankfully I just got an order for one through my shop on etsy. I’ve been working off of the same stack of walnut for years now, so I have a fairly good idea of how it will look when dressed. If I hadn’t been working from this same tree, I would be flying blind. In the photo below, you can see the board I used to construct the case. The board on the left is rough sawn; I haven’t done anything to it yet. The board on the right has been passed over the jointer (both to expose the beauty of the walnut and to flatten one face / square one edge). Sometimes you don’t know what you’re going to get until the lumber hits the jointer.

From there it was on to my normal sequence of planing, dimensioning, routing and assembling the case. I’m not going to detail those steps here, but there are plenty of other posts on this site that show those steps. Ultimately, I got to the point where the 2 boxes pictured below were ready for sanding. I decided I would add another lamp to the weekend build. Once you go through the steps to setup tools to build one, you feel like you might as well build a second one too. The box in the back is made from sapele. I’ve never worked with sapele before, but it seemed like I was getting a good deal on the lumber (and you can build an entire lamp from one board). Unfortunately, the photo isn’t the best… The ceiling light in my shop is not great, so the photo is overly lit by my space heater. As a result it’s hard to see any details or the colors of the lamps. Once I get to the finishing stages, all of the details will become clearer.