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The Landfall Garden House

60 Canon Bayley Road

Bonavista, Newfoundland

CANADA A0C 1B0

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Christopher Greaves

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.

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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.

Christopher Greaves BulbGarden_HPIM3351.JPG

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.

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Ah yes. Here is a better-focused shot.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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Look at the lovely clean aperture!

No jagged edges of glass.

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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.

709-218-7927 CPRGreaves@gmail.com

Bonavista, Thursday, November 25, 2021 5:34 AM

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