Landbridge Lighting - Antique Restoration and Custom Lighting Fabrication

An interesting article in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine that profiles a front runner for the U.S Government sponsored ‘L Prize’. It’s worth a read if you are at all curious about such things. While LEDs seem to be the most promising incandescent replacement, the article touches on some of the obstacles in manufacturing and engineering aspects of producing a viable candidate. It also addresses some of the reasons why incandescent bulbs are so much more pleasing to use, the primal and hardwired attraction to a light bulb that more closely reproduces the same spectrum of light as that of the African savanna.

I know that our customers are most drawn to the lamps and fixtures that we’ve outfitted with reproduction Edison bulbs, which look beautiful but are very inefficient. In noting that I should point out that the illustration for the Times’ article does not afford a comparable glow to the incandescent as it does to the LED, making the standard bulb look dim and sickly in comparison. Which is okay but worth noting. Perhaps the editors tried side by side images at a similar brightness and realized that the incandescent still managed to steal the gaze of the reader. Preferences as deep as evolutionary memories are hard to steer. I suppose that trying to arrest the damage we’re doing to the environment is accomplished largely through actions that run counter to our natural impulses. A glowing filament is pretty like a campfire.

When we started this business I worked part time for the first a few years for the architecture firm of Suyama Peterson Deguchi. I did general shop work, helped with the installation gallery Suyama Space, and blackened steel objects for sale in the firm’s retail space 3×10. When I learned that George and Jay were interested in having bronze fireplace logs cast, I piped up. I had taken several mold-making and lost wax bronze casting classes at Pratt Fine Art Center, a summer class at University of Washington in ferrous and non-ferrous metal casting, and had done some subsequent casting independently utilizing the University’s foundry.

George and Jay dug up five small logs (I added a bonus to the mix, a very nice and shapely stick that I pulled from a friend’s woodpile) and I set about making molds and waxes and found a small art foundry to rough-cast the bronze. The first foundry we used was Bob Mortenson Foundry. Bob was an interesting old guy, lightly surly, but friendly enough. He had been trying to get tenure at the University of Washington in the early seventies as an English professor (I think). Tenure just wouldn’t come and- as he had been hanging out with and learning casting from the art department at the University and had a family to feed- he built a small art foundry and made a living for better than a couple of decades. He was pretty close to retiring by the time I found him.

Bob did the casting and provided me with unfinished bronze logs. I TIG-welded the caps onto the rough-cast bronzes, chased and finished them and Suyama Peterson Deguchi had their first set of bronze logs. A few more sets followed, including a set of three larger logs- one a deep-barked fir(?) and the other two cut from a single large branch of white oak that an arborist friend of mine had given me.

When I left Suyama Peterson Deguchi to focus full time on Landbridge Lighting I offered to help produce future bronze logs. Recently, they took me up on that offer. I have been working on two sets each of the large group of three and the smaller group of six. This go round the casting has been done at 2 Ravens Studios in Tacoma.

The three originals.

Several of the waxes prior to chasing.

Two of the finished waxes just before delivery to the foundry.

Molds for the caps, cast seperately and welded on afterword.

Flat spots where the sprues were attached have to be reshaped and chased.

Among the tools used for retexturing the logs is this modified ball peen hammer.

Cast logs, unfinished with caps welded on.

Chased log about to be darkened.

Chased and finished bronze fireplace logs.

We have been spending a bit of time lately working with the Seattle Design District, trying to gather an array of designers, workshops, and showrooms in the Georgetown neighborhood and cobble them all together into an association. Being on the membership committee, Jesse has been spending more time with it than I have. I do show up for the general meetings and drink coffee and grunt occasional approval. There are quite a few very capable and dedicated people involved- Jay and Dixie Stark and Craig Cross most notably, and, hell, Jesse, too- and what began as a very intangible and unlikely idea has actually turned into something solid. In my world, solid is good.

Thursday, May 19th from 6 until 8 pm at Urban Enoteca the Seattle Design District Association will host a launch party. Come by and meet the members of this dynamic (said it and meant it) group. Learn about some of the people and businesses that make this southern end of Seattle such a vital and oft-visited neighborhood for the area’s design professionals. I’ll be there, sipping whiskey and grunting my approval.

Well, this sucks. WordPress ate our previous blog posts. That means you don’t get read about how much we like McMaster Carr, the unreasonable discomfort we felt in anticipation of the Northwest Design Gala, or our posts about various projects we’ve worked on in the past few months. But you do get to read this very unsatisfying post and that’s something. More to follow.