Over the course of 36 hours, I had 8 visits to 6 different Lowe’s and Home Depot locations. Either these two stores have stopped stocking and selling the light sockets I need for my lamps… Or they just have horrible back end systems. Really they should have seen that these sockets have been flying off the shelf and it’s time to buy more. Of course maybe they have ordered, but they haven’t been stocked to the shelves. Regardless of their reason, it looks like the internet will have to be my supplier of the future. Maybe this rant is a function of how I think for my big boy job rather than what I do at Claremont Designs on the weekends; let me get back to the woodworking…

The last tricky part of building a lamp is aligning the hole for the brass nipple and the opening where the bulb screws into the socket. I’ve shown in the past where I fit a board into the top of the lamp base and then drill through both boards at the same time. I usually focus those posts on drawing a series of evenly spaced lines on the support board. This time I figured I would show the next step in the process. The photo below shows the moment before I drill through both boards. Basically, I drill all of the way through both boards, then increase the bit size and only drill through the support board. I then remove the support board and swap out bits so that i can cut the large hole that the bulb fits through. I need to buy a proper drill press to do this more effectively and efficiently. Until then I’ve been using my dedicated mortising machine. It works just as well, but it’s definitely time for a new toy in the shop.