The New Hotness

The torchiere floor lamp in the sewing room suffered a catastrophic failure:

Contrary to what you might think from seeing the shattered plastic base, we didn’t use the lamp as a club or battering ram. Apparently the designer expected the thin plastic surrounding the hole to withstand all the torque produced by the long pole against the cheap concrete / mortar / grout / whatever lump in the base. As we can recall, this lamp came to us from either a yard sale or a roadside debris harvest, so I suppose the hardware outlasted any reasonable expectation.

The Basement Laboratory Warehouse disgorged the pole and base from a similar lamp, albeit sporting black paint and a smaller rod connecting its pole to its somewhat larger weight. Not being too fussy about decor, I embiggened the hole in the black base to fit the white lamp’s threaded rod:

The dust on the base shows why you shouldn’t stand motionless in the Basement Laboratory for very long.

The alert reader will have noted the cord passing through a strain relief grommet in the white base. Rather than dismantle the entire lamp, I just cut the cord, ran it through the new base weight, reinstalled the washer + nut, then crimped on a pair of solderless connectors:

The new base doesn’t offer much in the way of attachment points, so I added a cable tie to keep the strain off the connectors:

A strip of genuine 3M duct tape with double-thick adhesive now traps the cord inside that small channel and, given that the lamps spends most of its time standing quietly in a corner, the cord should be fine for long enough.