Thread:Meterman80/@comment-33231837-20190112190223



Here's another picture of the lamp now that I have (mostly) finished its restoration.

I believe either my great-grandmother had it in her house or it was a wedding present to my grandmother, as the original light socket had a 1909 patent date. When my grandmother had to be moved into a nursing home, my mother got this lamp, and it eventually wound up as the nightstand lamp in my younger sister's bedroom (later a guest room), and it continued in that role when my parents moved into a townhouse so Dad wouldn't need to use the stairs anymore.

Some time later, when my mother was getting ready to move from her townhouse into an assisted living apartment, I decided to take the lamp, else it was going to auction. It sat in a corner until a few weeks ago, as the lamp was simply tired by this point. The original turn-knob socket (with 1909 patent date) was quite fiddly to operate, many of the prisms were chipped (likely from fussing with the switch) and the hanging wires were bent (likely from trying to re-hang them after falling out - two even had twist-tie wire after the original support wire broke), the center post had some rust and was never assembled right, and the cord was showing some wear.

A few weeks ago, I bought a new light socket (a simpler push-through switch) a threaded center post, a vintage-style LED bulb in the correct size, and the whole lamp came apart for its first proper cleaning in decades, if ever. The result was posted elsewhere some time back, but I then found an online store (Antique Lamp Supply) that had a few more bits I needed for a proper restoration - a vintage-style cord, a better center post, and even a full set of 15 new chandelier prisms.

So the lamp came back apart, and looks MUCH better now. I started to prep the new prisms for installation before instead taking them to pieces and using them as parts to repair the originals instead (the new hooks were too long and the octagon bits were just a hair too big). The bent hanging wires all came off, got straightened out, and then bent once more into the correct configuration to fit (and stay on) the support ring. I still had the one non-original prism to deal with (it had a glass bead instead of an octagon), and I decided as it was part of that lamp's history, I replicated the arrangement by modifying one of the new prisms.

That said, the lamp still needs just a bit more help yet - the support ring still has a few old kinks in it that need to be properly straightened, and I need to find a nickel-plated 2" washer as the blueness of the steel washer I put in to replace the rusting original one stands out compared to the new center post (which vanishes into the glass in comparison). 