Chalkware Lamp Repairs

I have been busy lately fixing a few lamps that our friend Stephen brought to us that he purchased online and received broken. He always manages to find really great lamps.

This lamp had 8+ breaks in it. The only frame to this lamp are the white poles that go through it so it was gonna need some crazy gorilla glue to hold it together.

The first lamp I want to talk about is the really cool green Plasto Mfg. Co. lamp that he purchased. As you can see, this would have ended up in the garbage by most folks but Stephen thought I could fix it. After a lot of gluing, spackeling and sanding and a good amount of paint here is how it turned out!

I am amazed at how things turned out. Stephen also had me paint the lamp shade frames white and I relaced the shades. I also had to install a new push switch. Once Stephen gets the lamp back in place I will have him send me a pic to show it off.

The Next Lamp Stephen asked us to repair was a really cool Capri lamp. The damage wasn’t as bad as the one above but it did have a few good breaks. Here are a few pics of the damage it suffered during shipping:

I marked the areas that had damage with those really cool pink ovals…..I love pink! Anyways, here are closer images of the damage:

That looks like a pretty good crack!

This is towards the base, it seems to go all the way through.

Here is another crack up underneath one of the brass poles.

The one thing that always makes Stephen’s lamps a challenge to repair is the finish on each lamp. I have to really try hard to duplicate it with toothbrushes or stiff metal brushes. It would be interesting to see how they originally did it. I imagine they maybe used an airbrush to get that unique finish. Here is the lamp repaired and ready to go!

Look great!

Ok, that is a really cool lamp!

The next lamp may seem like deja vu but Stephan managed to find another very rare Frederick Weinberg horse lamp. Unfortunately like the other one he acquired this one was damaged too. This lamp had damage to the top of the front legs and it also had many small cracks. We were able to repair it in the same way we repaired the other one and it looks great in his home!

As you can see from the photo the crack goes all the way to the metal frame.

As usual, after glue, spackle, sanding and paint it was back to like new condition. These lamps are soo Mad Men! I could see these sitting in the background while Don Draper is trying to sell a pitch to some company at his advertising agency. These are very cool.

Here it is like new!

Here are both of the Weinberg horse lamps repaired and in Stephen’s home, they look soo nice together.

I know as long as chalkware lamps are shipped I have job security. I love being able to save these from the scrap heap and make them new again. The alternative is to just throw them away and I couldn’t do that. This is why I try to share my techniques so others can save these fascinating relics from a time gone by.