Nipples, Crochet Hooks, and 110 volts

Seven or eight years ago, my mother bought me a pair of lamps for my birthday. They're the kind that mount to the wall and swing out on an arm, and they're mounted on either side of our big sleigh bed. A month ago, the lamp on my side had begun flickering in an impertinent manner every time I turned it on. Finally, while sitting in bed reading one night last week, I noticed the carbon-y smell of burnt marshmallows and asked the Pirate if he smelled it. He didn't. I looked over at my lamp and went to shut it off when I realized that the entire fixture - the bit that the lightbulb screws into - was hot to the touch.

After turning the whole thing off and taking out the bulb, it became evident that it was in the process of shorting itself out, and the fixture was no good. The place where the bulb contacts the lamp proper was all carbonized and I knew that a new bulb would fare much the same, and probably even more quickly.

The Pirate offered to buy me a kerosene lamp and in fact ordered it, but after a couple of nights with candles as my bedside reading lamps, I realized it was no good. I wanted my old electric light back. Here's why: an electric lamp is a one-step thing. In the dark, you merely reach out and flick the switch and your entire room is illuminated. With non-electric lighting, first you have to find a flame. You can keep a lighter by your bed, but on a bedside table like mine you have no guarantee of finding it again once you've set it down. And once you've found a flame, you must then set it to your actual light source. In the case of kerosene lamps, you still have to wait five or ten minutes for the mantle to heat up before you can illuminate an entire room. If you have, say, accidentally poured the contents of your bedside water jug onto the floor, waiting ten minutes before you can be sure you've mopped it all up (and meanwhile giving it ample time to soak into the rug) is annoying.

Now that I know that I want my electric lamp back, my choices are these: 1) I can throw out this lamp and buy another one just like it. Difficult, because this type of lamp comes in sets of two. 2) I can buy a different lamp. While that's not a terrible idea, I like the look of the matching lamps, and I do insist that whatever I buy be mounted to the wall (see above comment about the obnoxiously crowded state of my bedside table). 3) I can fix the one I have.

I figured that I would at least take a poke at #3, since it was already dead and I couldn't hurt it any more. Worst-case scenario, I would declare the whole thing a loss and buy a new lamp and my bedroom will look as eclectic as the rest of my house. The word "eclectic" here means "nothing matches because I tend to buy furniture and dishes singularly when they're on sale."

I took the entire thing down from the wall and started trying to take it apart. The housing of the lamp consisted of two hollow metal tubes, fastened in the middle with an elbow that swung back and forth, and at the wall end with a similar connector that fastened it to the wall bracket. Here is a picture done by someone who's selling them, so it looks very nice. Behind the wall bracket bit was the part where the cord connected - the cord that plugged into the wall was a different cord than the one that went to the bulb. The two were fastened together with clever little connectors that you pushed the two wires into and snapped together.

I unconnected everything, but pulling the wire out of the lamp was tough - the part that had been connected to the bulb was all melty and the cord was stuck. It took pushing, pulling, prodding, and finally mangling one of my crochet hooks to pry the old cord out. What made it tough was what was going to make it tough putting it all back together - the fact that you have to make plastic coated wire go over a large number of sharp angles to get to its final destination.

The Pirate went to the hardware store, and for less than ten bucks got all the stuff we needed - new lamp guts, a new bulb and new wire. It took us a few tries, but we finally wired it all up again and it's now working great. Yes, the first time I realized that I'd put the base on upside-down and that the cord would be coming out of the top, so I had to take that piece apart and put it back together. Yes, we realized after we'd got the lamp guts wired that we should have screwed the housing on first, and THEN wired the lamp guts within the housing, so we had to undo it and put it back together. Sure, once it was all back together we realized that one of the nipples was screwed in a little too far so that now we have a little plug that's supposed to cover a hole, but it won't fit because the nipple is in the way. That's okay. I read that you always have parts leftover after any DIY job, so I'm feeling that it's a marker of success. And I'll do with it what I do with all leftover parts. I'm putting it into that drawer in the kitchen where we have screws and rubber bands and plug adapters and twist-ties and felt feet for furniture and all those other odds and ends.

So, as with all of these projects, I now have a new skill. I've fixed an expensive lamp. That means that I've saved something from the landfill, and that I've kept from buying a new thing I didn't need to buy. YAY! The downsides are two: I'm going to have to take the Dremel to my mangled crochet hook if I ever want to use it again, and I'm now looking around my house at all the tchotchkes and thinking "What else can I make into a lamp?"