So I bought a few bell jars on the beach antiquing adventure with AS and have been meaning since then to make them into lamps to match one I already had. I hit a few stumbling blocks though. First I bought two lamp kits from the hardware store. I even had the man in the store explain to me how to do the wiring part because the picture on the back of the kit was a little cloudy on that step, which seems to me to be the most important part. So I got home and a few days later followed the picture on the package and wired my first lamp. I plugged it into the wall and... boom. A couple sparks and all the lights in the room went out and my lamp did not turn on. So being such a smart person, I plugged it in another socket... and the TV went out. Obviously I was doing something wrong.
On a side note: For about two days, I thought the heating/air in the apartment was broken because nothing happened when I turned it on. Then it finally occurred to me that the air system might have gone out with the lamp experiment. I flipped the breaker on and off a couple times and finally, air again.
After getting all my lights to come back on, I called my dad, expert in all things wooden, electrical or mechanical slash basically everything. A quick convo later I learned that, no, the metal wires are not supposed to cross before you screw them into the lamp. They are actually not allowed to touch each other. Well, that explains a lot, I thought, but why was the box leading me in exactly the wrong direction!? You would think they would test these directions out on someone completely electrically illiterate before they printed them. But I digress.
The next hurdle came when I compared the lids from my jars to the lid from the lamp I already had. The existing jar lid was just medal. Mine were reinforced with what looked like plastic but turned out to be zinc. Very tough, hard, impenetrable-looking zinc.
Today though I finally decided to man up and start drilling. Using a power drill I borrowed from APP, I got out my work bench (read: my Ikea tool kit flipped upside down with a flattened pasta box on top of it for padding) and went to work. I got through the metal layer okay with the drill but that zinc was having none of it. And then I started to get worried about inhaling zinc dust (in that a thing?). Not worried enough to actually do anything about it though, obviously. I finally got a big enough opening that I could try hammering a large nail past the hole I'd gotten through the metal and into the zinc. Not exactly elegant, but no one has ever said I was good at using power tools. The nail actually worked though! The zinc shattered into pieces and I was able to drill a large enough hole through the lid!
Shattered zinc pieces:
