An incredible being of lightness

CORNWALL — Sometimes, working with your hands is really about working with your brain. 

For Jeff Jacobson, a retired businessman, it’s the hands that bring his projects to life; and certainly one might say that he is a “handy” guy. But the final products are products of a busy mind that brings the hands along for the ride.

And that ride is usually in some kind of elegant and esthetically pleasing race car. Jacobson loves old cars, and has collected a few and raced a few more. His tastes range from three-wheeled vintage Morgans to similarly aged and quirky Ford pickup trucks. 

He’s not a muscle car guy, he’s not a Ferrari guy, he’s a guy who particularly appreciates the efficiency and simplicity of a well-designed machine. And like many vintage car fans, he likes a vehicle that he can take apart and reassemble.

For that reason, he not only knows intimately the parts of gorgeous old vehicles — he also has a lot of them lying around in the workshop of his home in the Coltsfoot Valley. 

“A lot of times I’ll have a part with a hairline crack that you can’t really see but that makes it unfit to use in a car,” he said.

It’s a shame to throw those things out; but that isn’t really what got Jacobson involved in his new, retirement-era career as an artist and creator of one-of-a-kind lamps.

It was his wife that did it. Gail Jacobson, in addition to being his spouse and his business partner for many years, is a person who, in her words, just can’t stop making things (see her website, www.cantstopmakingthings.com, for proof — and for amazing craft ideas). 

Gail didn’t want to be the one having all the fun, so she took her husband out to a high-end home design shop in the area and piqued his interest with some handsome, handmade lamps.

Jeff was inspired and not long after had completed his first lamp, made from car parts. 

In the hands of the wrong person, that lamp might have looked goofy or kitschy, but in the hands of Jacobson it came out as a graceful, elegant, well-balanced piece of industrial art.

He enjoyed doing it. He immediately found a business partner in Greg and Natalie Randall, owners of R. T. Facts in Kent, a shop that sells architectural salvage and works of art made from and inspired by architectural salvage. The lamps have proved to be strong and steady sellers, despite a price range of $1,500 to $4,000. 

In the past three and a half years, Jacobson estimates that he’s made 40 lamps, which is an impressive number when you realize how much time, effort and (above all) thought goes into each piece. 

First come the mechanical parts. Not all of them are from cars. 

“It’s all types of mechanical components that interest me,” he said. Jacobson has his own old machine odds and ends, friends offer him bits that they’ve retired from use in their vintage cars and the Jacobsons shop together at salvage shops such as P&T Surplus in Kingston, N.Y.

Then comes the thinking. Sometimes an idea arrives right away but “sometimes I’ll sit and stare at them on my worktable until an idea comes up.”

Then the idea has to conform with mechanical exigencies; lamps, after all, run on electricity.

“You have to figure out how to get the wiring into it,” he said. And of course the wiring has to be unobtrusive and has to match the esthetic entirety of the piece. Because these are new lamps made from old parts, Jacobson prefers to use old-fashioned wiring, such as the fabric-covered wire he gets from a company in Waterbury that makes vintage lamps.

Next, the pieces have to be combined into a whole that is lightweight and well-balanced — the head of the lamp can’t be so heavy that it pulls the whole thing over if you move it. Jacobson has figured out ingenious ways to compensate for the shifting weight of the moving parts; these aren’t lamps that one must forever be diving to catch as they fall off the edge of a table. They move smoothly and quietly, like a very good butler, to make sure the parts never overwhelm the whole. 

You don’t need to understand how or why these lamps work so well; you don’t even necessarily need to notice or acknowledge how smart they are.

But most of the people who buy them do indeed notice and care.

“Greg and Natalie told me that most of these lamps end up on the desks of CEOs, architects and designers,” Jacobson said, before adding (for the second or third time) that he isn’t actually making these lamps to sell them. He’s making them because he enjoys the process, and there isn’t room in his house for 40 lamps. 

Like a loving parent who must give up a child for adoption, he sends each lamp away with a “build sheet” that gives an extensive history of the main parts of the lamp. A fixture made with parts from a 1935 Alfa Romeo Grand Prix car doesn’t just come with the name of the car; it also often comes with a history of the notable races and drivers that the car has been involved with.

Not all the parts of every lamp are vintage. To fit all the pieces together, Jacobson custom machines rods and joints and adapts gears and other bits.

“I don’t really solder or glue things together,” he said, adding that, “It’s cheesy to use glue. I put these lamps together as though they were a car.”

A really nice car.

And just as old cars seem simple compared to the new, computerized machines we all drive today, those vintage racers are not in fact simple. They are finely tuned and exquisitely balanced amalgams of heavy parts, held together by ingenuity, obsession and love. Like Jacobson’s lamps.

“I call this line, Light Machinery: Complications in Lamps,” he said, with a grin.

To see photos, go to R.T. Facts’ website at www.rtfacts.com. It’s better, though, to stop at the shop in the Kent Barns area of Kent and touch the lights and see how they work. There will be a show of Jacobson’s work there in November.