Ikea light customization (Aluminum TIG welding)

[jakeru]

My wife brought home some Ikea lights to replace some wall lights in a room in our house that she is "making over", but the Ikea lights were incompatibly designed to be plugged in to a receptacle, and merely hung on the wall, while the original lights were installed over electric boxes and use in-wall switched circuit. We liked the style of these Ikea lights to go with our 1950's modern home theme though.

So what is a fabricator to do? Modify them to make them work, of course!

Here is what one of the Ikea lights started out as:


To make them fit over electric lighting wall boxes, I needed to fabricate some plates. Here is the beginning of the plates: 4" 6061 aluminum flat bar (1/8" thick) being cut into 4" squares:


But they also needed a recessed back for the wall box hardware. So I decided to build the edges up with my TIG machine (Everlast Super200P) to thicken the plates, while creating the recessed area. It was handy to use stainless angle as a guide for the built-up areas:


Here the TIG build-up operation is complete.


Next I flattened the sides using my granite surface plate with spray-mounted sandpaper. If I had a belt sander that would have been handy, but good quality fresh course grit sandpaper made the job go way faster by hand. Below shows two plates after sanding (each now about 1/2" thick), and a pic of the recessed back side:


I did a similar modification on the factory Ikea slider piece, which was designed to have a light cord hanging through it, to make it more presentable as it would soon be used. This piece was die-cast aluminum with some sort of clear coating on it - welded fine after removing the coating. Modified piece shown next to an unmodified piece below:


Next it's time to do some drilling... I am appreciating this drill press more and more as I learn more tricks to use it effectively:


The Ikea aluminum alloy was a little bit brittle, and drilled nice. 6061 was more gummy/stringy by comparison. 4043 used as filler material for the built-up areas seemed to color match both. I plug welded the pieces together, and relieved the edge of a hole for the wires with the die grinder:


My wife found some nickel plated nuts to complete the installation (retaining the fixture over a threaded post that fastens to the wall box). Here is one of the lights all installed and turned on:

[undercut]

Nice job! I like the lights after your modifications much better than the stock versions. Look much classier. Cheers!

[Spike]

That's quite a build up job on those baking plates. Was there a reason you went to build it up (other than 'because I can' ) with the welder rather than cutting and welding strips onto the base plate?

[jakeru]

I originally intended to build it up much less... maybe 1/8" or so, which I did initially without the stainless backer. But then after I got it that far, I realized it would look even better if I built it up thicker. I also wanted to try using the stainless angle as a backer for the more "extreme" buildup to see if it would work, so decided to give that technique a try.

It was kind of interesting that the aluminum would even "wet out" and stick to a degree in some spots right on the stainless. (there is potential to join the materials together with a low-strength bond I think... kind of interesting.) It went pretty fast using the stainless steel angle as a backer, for how thick the built up material was. I prefer doing my experimentation and development of new techniques on personal projects, like this. Afterwards, I can take the newfound knowledge of what works (or doesn't) and potentially apply it to my paid welding jobs.

[DVA]

That is alot of work to build a box but looks great, keep up the good work.