Tag: Repairs

Replacing the second torchiere lamp shade required unscrewing its 100 W equivalent LED bulb, which required far too many turns and eventually felt sufficiently wrong to reveal the problem:

The entire metal base shell unscrewed from the plastic housing and twisted off the lead from what looks like a PTC fuse in series with the center contact; the cute little pigtail effect suggests I’ve wrecked the epoxy-to-wire seal.

It had a five year warranty which, alas, expired three years ago. This style of bulb has fallen out of favor, so I may as well get some Quality Shop Time out of it.

I don’t know how the factory machinery attached the lead to the contact button, but I’m going to go primal on it with some solder. The trick will be soldering it after assembly, so the first step is to drill through the middle of the button.

Grab it nose-down in the Sherline’s three-jaw chuck, flip it over, grab the chuck in the drill press vise, line it up, center-drill the button, then drill right through that sucker:

Of course, the contact came loose from the base, because I pretty much drilled right through the rivet flange holding it in place:

Nothing a dab of epoxy can’t fix, though. I scuffed up the outside of the contact to remove the nickel (?) plating and expose the underlying brass to improve its solderability.

After the epoxy cured, align wire with hole, screw the base onto the lamp shell, and it’s ready for soldering:

The hole is way too large for the wire, but I wasn’t about to wreck a tiny drill on what might have been a weld nugget. In any event, the bigger the blob, the better the job:

Just like light bulb bases used to look, back in the day.

With a bit of luck, it’ll sit in that socket for another seven years.

It could happen, ya never know.

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.