DIY Lamp Rewiring: Restore Your Old Lamps with Modern Safety

2024-09-22 | By bekathwia

License: See Original Project Light

‎Today we're rewiring old lamps.‎

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I got invited to participate in this lamp show at my hackerspace, NYC Resistor, and it got me ‎dusting off my yellow antique banquet lamp. This thing used to be a gas lamp, and at some point, ‎it was converted to electrical. So, it has a socket, a bulb, and a cord. But the cord is not up to ‎modern safety standards, and it's kind of ugly.

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So, I took the opportunity to clean the whole lamp, which made it easier to also rewire the cord ‎while I was at it.‎

This is an easy project that you can do at home, but it's a little dangerous because you're ‎plugging into AC mains power. So, double-check your work with somebody who knows what ‎they're doing, and be sure to unplug the cord while working on the wiring.‎

The supplies you will need are:‎‎

Screwdriver
Wire strippers
Pliers
Tape‎
AC electrical cord with plug‎

Traditional type available at DigiKey
I used fabric-colored cord from Color Cord Company

‎Lamp socket

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To replace the cord on the yellow banquet lamp, I had to first undo the wires from the socket ‎itself, then take it apart (but not as far as I thought I was going to have to) and remove the old ‎wire. Next, I passed the new wire up through the channel where the old wire had been and got to ‎work attaching it to the socket.‎

In this case, there's nothing wrong with this socket. It was just the cord that was a little ratty, so ‎I'm going to reuse the same socket.‎

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I received some really fun fabric-covered lamp cord from Color Cord Company. I used a special ‎razor tool to cut the taped fabric layer and wire insulation, then stripped the wire ends. Once the ‎lamp cord is inserted through the lamp, it’s time to tie the two ends in a lineman's knot. ‎

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This is going to provide some strain relief, so in case the wire gets pulled, it won't pull so hard ‎directly on the electrical connections. It will just pull on the knot a little bit, and then it will stretch ‎back into place.‎

Then once you've got the lineman's knot done, you're going to coil the stripped ends of the wires ‎to the right, because that's the way you're going to turn (righty tighty, lefty loosey) on the screws. ‎Then attach the black positive wire to the gold screw terminal and the white negative wire to the ‎silver screw terminal.‎

Color Cord has a video showing you how to wire up each of their sockets, including the ‎grounded ones. If you accidentally wire it backward, the possible consequences are tripping a ‎breaker and/or breaking your power strip.‎

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So, I tried to help myself remember the correct wiring by noting that the silver terminal is a white ‎metal compared to the gold one, so it goes to the white wire.‎

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And if you have a wire with a third green ground wire, it’s ok to cut it off if your socket doesn’t ‎have a ground contact, it just won't be a grounded fixture.

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Then I put the lamp back together and I think it looks great. I'm very happy with it and I couldn't ‎get enough, so I did the two other lamps I have in the room: the valve lamps I made a couple of ‎years ago. You can watch the video about building them on my channel. I wanted to replace the ‎cords because they weren't long enough for our current situation. I didn't like how the cord light ‎couldn't drape all the way away. And then also the color was like what I could get at the time, ‎which was brown. But I like the orange better and I think it matches the lampshades better.‎

So, I went ahead and got some orange cord for these lamps and replaced those too. This second ‎and third lamp I did went a lot faster than the first one. -- proof that practice makes skills easier ‎with time.