Bulbs For a Bulb Garden

In “ I Never Promised You A Rose Garden ” I showed how to fill lamp bulbs with plant cuttings.

Today I learned a superb method of stripping blown lamp bulbs – much better than cutting the glass.

Here is a regular North American lamp bulb – 40W through 100W variety.

I am holding it in a hand gloved with a thick work glove.

Throughout the exercise I will ALWAYS be holding the metal ferrule, NEVER holding the glass bulb, but we are going to produce showers of glass fragments, so I do all the work holding the lamp bulb inside the confines of my “hardware waste” bin.

Not the best of shots.

The base of the lamp has a flat brass plug onto which is applied a dab of solder. When the lamp bulb is crewed into a socket, the blob of solder provides one contact for the electrical circuit.

Ah yes. Here is a better-focused shot.

In this shot you can see that I have managed to squeeze the edges of the brass plug with a pair of regular pliers.

It doesn’t take a lot of force, just a gentle squeezing and a bit of rocking to-and-fro with the pliers.

Once that is done, grip the now flat-edged brass plug with the pliers and give a gentle twist.

The brass plug will break free from the black ceramic glass sealing ring.

In the photo above, the squeezed brass plate is lying on the table, and a small (2mm diameter) hole has appeared in the black ceramic glass sealing ring.

Here is a better view of the hole.

You can see that the black ceramic glass sealing ring has split in two across its diameter.

Here is another view of the split black ceramic glass sealing ring.

I use a small screwdriver to fidget shards of ceramic away from the metal ferrule. The shards are tipped out of the socket as I work.

Now the black ceramic glass sealing ring is gone. The connector to the filament can be seen protruding out of the inner bulb.

A lamp bulb has TWO containers; the outer one with which we are familiar, and a stumpy one which holds the filament in place.

I have used a pair of needle-nosed pliers to break the small glass container, freeing the filament. The pliers help me chip away the rim of the glass.

And here we see the filament being dropped out of the bulb, along with any shards of glass.

Look at the lovely clean aperture!

No jagged edges of glass.

The same bulb, side view.

Besides cradling these in the nylon mesh bags that used to hold onions, I could use picture hanging wire or soft wire to loop around the ferrule and build a collection of bulbs not unlike a string of onions.

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