Re-purposed Vacuum Tubes Make Pretty Cool Decorations

By Oct 6th, 2011, 4:15 pm

There’s nothing quite like hacked-together, nouveau-vintage odds and ends to give your domicile a certain air of “Boy, that sure is neat.” Autuin of Free Geek Vancouver (the same guy who brought you the Wi-Fi, picture-stealing picture frame) knows this well, which is presumably why he decided to take some old vacuum tubes and fashion them into light fixtures.

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If you aren’t intimately familiar with vacuum tubes — and lets face it, you probably aren’t — they aren’t actually designed to put out light. That being the case, Autuin rigged up the light fixtures to run at double the rated voltage, resulting in a nice little glow. And if vacuum tube lights weren’t enough, he also put a modern day jump drive inside a vacuum tube. On his blog, he mentions that he thought it was sort of funny, putting millions of switches inside the body of one old one. I’m inclined to agree.

Check out more pictures after the jump.