Rare and Repaired Mercury Capsule Lamp

This damaged vintage Space Race Mercury Lamp arrived a week ago with the lampshade in bad shape. The lampshade is shaped and painted like the Mercury Capsule used in our man carrying rocket launches into outer space. The collector's request was to try and make it at least good for static display. There were three main issues with the shade, the socket's mount was broken through the top of the shade and two seperate "fault lines" of hairline cracks stretched about one third the length of the shade. First task was to stabilize the cracks. Use of JB Weld carefully mixed was our choice here to match the gray colored plastic. This meant masking off those areas first so that the silver painted lines throughout the design would remain intact. Next the mixed JB was pressed into the cracks and the lampshade clamped to compress the cracks for 24 hours. Once cured the lampshade became stable enough to address the heavily damaged lamp socket mounting surfaces. First, the bolt-on switch stem on the lamp socket was measured for length. I found that a three part sandwich of thin steel flashing for outside laminations with the damaged surface held in between would still allow assembly with the original lamp socket. The layout of the two new steel disks also incorporated the three existing air holes. The critical interior steel lamination was set in place with JB Weld and 10 pounds of steel mass pushing down on a table with the open side of the lamp shade facing up. Then a 24 hour cure for that step. Next came affixing the top lamination of the second steel disk to complete the 3-layer sandwich. For the loss of the missing plastic chunks, enough JB was applied to fill in the voids. With holes lined up and pressed into place, another 24 hour cure. Finally it came to rewiring, cleaning all the rust off the gooseneck then coating with WD-40, cleaning the little steel globe and installing a new low wattage LED Bulb. Plugged it in and turned it on... ready for either static display or even function as designed once again as a desk lamp. Tom (SANDMAN OVERHAUL)