Momma's K-Cup Holder

The finished lamp

When Momma said she just wanted a K-Cup holder for Christmas, she expected a $15.00 plastic rack from Wal-mart. Instead she got a bar lamp.

Chiselling

I started by cutting squares in a piece of Oak.

The Tower of Power

Then I added side panels and pillars to hold the pods. It was at about this point that the project stopped being a K-cup holder and the lamp idea kicked in. The focus switched to the shade...

Building frames

In order to maintain the same angle on all the frames, I made a gluing jig that locked in the parts being glued.

Tird leg.

The third side was glued in at the same angle by flipping the part in the jig. Unfortunately my camera card was corrupted, so I have no pics of cutting compound angles or adding the 4th leg.

Glue-up

Cutting the compound angles to put the frames together was super-tricky. It took 2 tries. Once everything lined up I did a happy dance.

Hnnnng.

Lines up nice in 3 planes! I'm more proud of this than I ought to be.

Test fitting

Just a check for scale - the tower is proportional to the shade, so I'm happy. Time to finish off the tower and move on to shading the shade.

The shades

I went through about 2 dozen ideas for filling in the panels on the shade. Originally I was going to use stained glass. Then punched tin, then cloth, etched glass, fabric, etc. etc.

In the end I did 2 sides with scrap book paper, and 2 sides with canvas over 1/4" hardboard. I drilled out a pattern in the hardboard.

Pattern

Momma likes the pattern, but I should have used thinner hardboard for it - not enough light gets through.

All assembled

I finished the whole thing in Brazillian Cherry. It looks good on the bar. Now Momma can make herself a coffee after dinner and add a shot of baileys or rum without lighting up the whole room. The K-cups rotate so that she can put different flavours on different sides, and just spin the tower to get the ones she wants.