Fixing a floor lamp

Swiss cheese - or a block of hole-y steel.

My wife bought a floor lamp sometime last year to use while sewing. It’s a long, skinny LED strip thing with a really heavy steel plate for a foot.

Last week, I went to move it out of the way - and nearly got my foot broken by the lamp’s foot.

A weld broke, and the foot separated from the post of the lamp.

Broken lamp

This little plate was originally welded to the upright tube of the lamp:

Broken weld

The base plate fell on a corner and bent the decorative aluminum plate covering the steel weight in the foot, so the first thing to do was to flatten it back out again:

Flattening the corner

I clamped it between a couple of wooden blocks and squeezed it hard. That didn’t get it completely flat, so I took it and hammered on it a little, too.

To replace the dinky little welded on plate, I made this thing:

Swiss cheese

It has two holes matching the holes in the base (that’s the two sticking out at the camera,) and then it has four more to screw into the upright tube.

Were you ever sure that you had a tool, then found you didn’t? I’d have sworn I had a 4mm tap and a tapping handle, but when I went to tap the screwholes, I found I had a 3mm tap and no tapping handle. I had to go to the hardware store and buy tools I thought already I had.

I shortened the screws to about 4 or 5 millimeters long, except for the ones in the base. They had to be long enough to go through the steel plate and then another 4mm into the block.

The block went into the tube like this:

Installed block

With the block inside, I screwed the foot back onto the lamp:

Reassembled

With it all back together again, you’d never guess that it had tried to amputate my toes:

Fixed lamp

Now we’ll just wait and see if my little block of steel swiss cheese holds up better than the original, welded in dinky steel plate.