Overhanging Desk Work Light

The SheekGeek office doesn’t have very good lighting and because of this, working on things at my work desk is always tough.  I’ve tried a lot of different solutions to this problem such as the lighted helping hands set-up, sitting a small fluorescent light on top of my parts organizer, and even hanging the lamp from a couple of the bins on the top row of the parts organizer.  None of these provided a good solution.  The fluorescent lamp was rather blinding, and with every solution, my hands cast shadows on what I’m working on.  This lead me to finally come up with a great working solution to my problem that casts no shadows.

A couple of years ago when I wrote for Hackaday I did an article about the Hacker’s Soldering Station. Since then, that station became too bulky and impractical for my office.  I needed something that was easier to move, or possibly break down to take up less space.  I looked around at what I had on hand and slapped together this quick fix that is the perfect solution for my needs.

For parts, I gathers a bunch of scrap 3/4″ PVC pipe and pipe connectors, a 24″ long fluorescent lamp (actually recycled for the hacker’s soldering station project), two screws and some zip ties.

The first thing I did was to gather and arrange my parts.  Once you are sure how you want the thing to work, then cut all the pieces to length.  The pic below shows that I had to splice together a few smaller pieces to math the length of the lamp.  be sure to leave enough room for the power cable for the lamp (the extra length of pipe on the right-hand side in this pic).  Mark where the screw holes need to be with a permanent marker.

Using one of mankind’s greatest inventions, the step drill, drill out a hole large  enough for one end of the power cable of the fluorescent lamp to fit through into one of the 90 degree L bends.

Again, using the step drill,drill a small starter hole in each of the PVC pipes you marked for the screw holes.

Make the two side supporting bars by making two T shapes.  The longest pieces of PVC should be the center support of the T.

Now put it all together and feed the power cable through the pipe. put the screws in the screw holes and place and hang the lamp on them. I added some zip ties to make sure it didn’t fall off while I’m working under it.  Here you can see the extra piece I added on the bottom, back left.  I added this for extra support since that side is closest to the edge of the table.

Since there is no glue involved in this project, it can easily break down, but an added bonus to this design is that you can spin the pole the light is attached to.  This allows you to direct it where ever you need it, and add some indirect lighting if you need it.