Build Your Own Lava Lamp

Manip writes "My new project: 'The difficult part about making your own liquid motion lamp is, of course, the motion. We won't go into the lamp base too much. The store-bought ones use a 40w appliance bulb in a metal housing which directs the heat to the underside of the glass container. If you're making your own base, we recommend installing a dimmer switch so that you can control your heat output.'"

Re:Fun projects

[josh crawley]

Now if we could only build our own plasma globes too...

You can... flyback transformer from a television, some steel wool, and a glass globe. Maybe a handful of other Radio-Shack components and wires. The toughest part is finding a suitable globe, evacuating the air from it, and filling it with gas to make the color you want, but it can be done with mostly off-the-shelf stuff.

The real reason these things went out of fashion

[meowsqueak]

...is because they were found to be responsible for numerous house fires. I suspect the modern ones are far safer than those made in the 1970's, but I'd expect a home-made one to be potentially quite dangerous.

So I guess /. is the right place for it! :)