We’ve made a table lamp and curtain tiebacks from our Subaru WRX‘s old crankshaft and connecting rods (look for them in the April 2014 issue of Grassroots Motorsports). Those were ideas done with decor in mind. This one, however, was done out of practicality.
We’ve long had this floor lamp—a very cheap piece bought at Big Lots—and for more than a year now, it’s been without a weighted base. The weight it came with was some kind of cheap concrete mix that crumbled and fell apart one of the times we moved the lamp. Our temporary solution was to just put a weight on top of the base, but it wasn’t very elegant. When visiting a friend a few nights ago, the thought occurred: We can use a WRX brake rotor for the base!
As it turned out, the 1/2-inch (12.6mm) threaded nipple at the bottom of the lamp fit perfectly inside the 13mm lug stud hole in the brake rotor. We had a pair of these STI brake rotors from our recent Brembo swap—the STI’s Brembo calipers bolt up, but we had rotors from a later car with a different bolt pattern. We yanked those old rotors out of the scrap bin and put them to work.
The color on these used rotors match the lamp itself very well. We could even feed the lamp cord through the cooling fins in the rotor. A knot on the inside acts as a strain relief—though in retrospect, we should’ve actually looked up the Underwriter’s Knot and done that instead.
We’re counting this not only as gearhead decor, but as an Earth-friendly activity too. We kept a lamp in service and put a scrap rotor to good use. That’s the middle part of the “reduce, reuse and recycle” mantra.
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