How to Rewire a Vintage Lamp

Today we’re rewiring old lamps.

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 and a bulb and a cord. But the cord is not up to modern safety standards, and it’s kind of ugly.

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 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:

1. Screwdriver
2. Wire strippers
3. Pliers
4. Tape
5. AC electrical cord with plug
6. Traditional type available at DigiKey
7. I used fabric-colored cord from Color Cord Company
8. Lamp socket

Follow along with the video tutorial!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.