What I am doing is rewiring and refurbishing some old floodlight-type fixtures I got for free from the
theatre. (Actually for those who are interested, they are Kliegl Olivettes I believe.) They have an E39
mogul base socket in them, which was wired to
stagepin plugs, but the wiring was
asbestos wiring, and I need
edison plugs anyway. I already need to disassemble and repaint them (I'm using high-temp grill paint), and I obviously needed new wiring. I understand that most fixtures have lamp assemblies that are usually more complex, but this is definitely not one of those fixtures. It's no more complicated than wiring a regular household light
bulb. The only thing I'm adding is a
ground wire, which I will connect to the chassis. I also know that having this kind of bulk
wire available is handy when you're refurbishing old fixtures in general. For example, at the aforementioned
theatre all the old lights had/have
asbestos wiring, which has been gradually replaced with the new sheathing material and heat resistant
wire.
I do agree though, this is not something that should be done by everyone...
Actually, refurbishing these lights has been an interesting research project. It turns out they were designed to be used on a floor stand, for which I seem to have the
base, but I lack a strange piece of hardware, which is like a big solid
iron cone bent 90 degrees with a threaded hole, which would mate with the threaded rod on the matching
cone thing on the lights. To make up for this, I came up with a mounting
yoke of sorts for both instruments which uses 1" square steel bolted to a pipe cap which has a 2' pipe on it to fit over a tripod light stand. To fix the lights to the stand so that they are overhung, I put eye bolts in the square steel, which go between the large side of the
cone flange and a
nut (with rubber washers in between). I will post more pictures of this later...it's probably not the most perfect solution, but it was the simplest I could come up with; other alternatives included drilling new holes in the
fixture and/or making up light yokes of some kind, which would have to attach at the bottom of the
fixture and come up all the way around to the top...
Anyway, that's my story.
-Dan