Refurbishing an Old Lava Lamp
Just got through replacing the power cord and switch on an old lava lamp while keeping the appearance, other than the cord color, identical. The original cord was brown, the new one is white, but otherwise identical.
I got this so long ago probably 40-45 years ago and I just recently pulled it out of storage and added it to my office decor, add a little red light which the LED bulbs do not produce, and some motion.
The switch had become intermittent and since it was integral to the cord, fixing it really required replacing the whole thing, but this was challenging. First there was a cardboard with felt disk on the bottom I had to remove, it was glued on but careful work with a pocket knife released it intact. Then the socket was held to the bottom with a nut but you could not remove the bottom plate as it was spot welded to the base, so the only way for the socket to come out was through the opening for the bulb and given this was only about 1/32nd of an inch larger than the socket itself this was no fun.
Reinserting the socket back into the hole in the base was tricky since it's basically a blind operation but after much futzing finally got lucky and got it through and put the nut back on.
The cord was mounted in the base with a heyco, but I managed to compress with vice grips and remove intact and use with the new cord.
All in all it was a challenging operation. Now I just have to wait for the glue on the felt pad on the base to dry and it will be as good as new.
I was worried about being able to get bulbs since most incandescents are outlawed, but there is an exception for oven bulbs and that happens to be what this uses. So $6 got me a two pack from Amazon.
