Teslapunk Electical Switch
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Several years ago I had the idea of using a vintage knife type switch like the one below to make a safe light switch for the Steampunk living room I was working on. I thought this type of switch would work well with the room theme in a slight variation in the Teslapunk style. So I made a Teslapunk Electrical Switch. For more on Teslapunk see here.
Obviously with the open copper conductors using a switch like this as it was designed to be used would potentially electrocute anyone who touched it.
Instead I decided to use a 125VAC 15 Amp Micro-Switch to do the actual electrical switching and fabricated a light switch based on these components. Micro-Switches have a small spring loaded button on the surface that takes very little force to actuate.
The Micro-Switch above is the type I used.
I used a piece of quarter inch steel plate as the base for the unit.
The Micro-Switch was mounted to the plate with a piece of aluminum. A brass strip was used to make an actuator for the Micro-Switch button,
A plunger was fabricated that would slide through two holes in the ceramic base of the knife switch. If the switch were used as designed, these holes would have accommodated wires leading to the knife switch screw connections. When the knife switch is closed it pushes this plunger into the brass strip that is against the Micro-Switch button and activates it.
This is how the completed switch will mount to the electrical box in the wall. The blue box underneath is a standard size in wall electrical box used for outlets and switches.
The completed switches. I actually ended up making four of these. I added faux mounting screws in each corner of these steel base by drilling and tapping the holes to accept 6-32 screws. The steel plate was sanded then treated with rust activator. After the rust formed the plate was coated with a clear flat finish that halts the rusting process as well.
The switch mounted to the wall.
Same switch in the open/off position.
Matching outlet covers were made from the same quarter in steel plate used for the light switches.
The back of each cover was milled to shape so that it would fit over and around the outlet plugs. The fronts had the faux screws added and then the surface was rusted as with the switches.
A completed outlet cover.
I also had to make some dimmer switches. One set was made from brass gears. For the knobs that normally slide onto the dimmer controls brass gears were used. Small brass gears were mounted to brass rod and bored out to the correct diameter. The centers of the plastic knobs that came with the dimmers were cut out and shaped to insert into the brass gears.
Copper plate was used as the back of the dimmer cover. It was framed with quarter inch square brass rod that was soldered to the copper. This frame allowed it to stand out from the wall leaving space for the workings underneath.
Larger gears were mounted to the plate at a distance that would impinge on the smaller gears silde onto the controls. By rotating the larger gears the dimmers could be turned up and down. I used dimmers that rotated to the off position.
Finished copper clad gear dimmer plate.
