Here’s a frustrating story – about me fixing a lamp which should have been easy!
I have a floor lamp, in which during a move, its concrete base broke and crumbled away. It sat around for a while before I thought of throwing it out, but then realized that all it needed was a heavy base mounted to it; everything else about it worked fine. I went to the hardware store and found a brick – easy enough. I told my dad about it and he thought it was the perfect excuse to get some masonry drill bits, so I gave him the brick.
A few months later during a visit, he handed me back the brick with a nice hole drilled through its center. He also made a fancy new base for the whole lamp – the brick would sit on top of this wooden base and a nice groove was cut out of the bottom so the electric cord could fit and the whole thing would sit flush on the floor. Fancier than what I would’ve done – thanks!
So now this heavy base was much thicker than the original base for the lamp, so all I needed now was simply a longer threaded hollow rod to go through the brick from the lamp post to base and fastened tight with the original nut. Easy enough – I’ve seen such 4-inch and 6-inch rods before; so off to the hardware store again to pick one up.
And here’s where the almost-done-job goes sour. I get back and try to screw the threaded rod into the base of the lamp… and it doesn’t. The nut also can’t go on. So the following night I return the rods and go to another hardware store. I also take along the original rod and nut. That store has more choices in lamp parts, but none which match what I have.
A few days later I go to a third store and nothing they have also works. I dig around in the aisle of loose nuts, bolts and screws and there is a template or trial board of various threaded bolts and nuts at different sizes and threading types. There is where I find that what I have matches perfectly with a ½” diameter bolt with 20 threads per inch. Unrelated, but this is when I finally understood what the heck wavenumbers were.
The following week I stop at the fourth store, an actual lamp store. They have no such thing that matches. This is getting ridiculous. How is it that this part – which came from a lamp, and I’m holding in my hand – simply not existing anywhere else? I start looking online.
I learn there that what I’m looking for is officially called a lamp nipple. The numbers I’ve been seeing on the parts in stores (1/4 IP, 1/8 IP) are the standards for lamps, in which IP stands for Iron Pipe (even though these parts are all made out of brass or zinc) and the 1/4, 1/8 are the radius of the pipes. They also explicitly have certain thread standards. The size I had (and needed) was 1/4 IP, 20 threads per inch, but 1/4 IP only ever comes with 18 threads per inch.
I stop at a fifth hardware sometime the following week. I’ve never been to this place; I find out that it’s a proper hardware store! Creaky wooden floors, uneven wooden floors, floors that have a single step up or down on entry! Multiple different levels with stuff all over the place! Thin stairways to a far larger room than expected! Walls in strange places! Wood stoves and furnaces in one room, tents in the basement, Christmas and Halloween decorations stuffed on the second floor! Years of dust on a boarded-up window still! The bathroom stuffed behind a really awkward corner! This is how hardware stores should be, none of that giant soulless expanse of a warehouse that current hardware stores are!
While this fifth store had a lot more stuff, even stuff that isn’t even made anymore, they sadly didn’t have anything that could work. I contacted some stores online and the response so far has been “I am sorry but I do not know where you will find one with 20TPI.” So I started looking at something that might work with metric standards.
And metric threading standards couldn’t just be similar. They couldn’t be like ’15 threads per centimeter’. Nooooo, they have to follow some other bizarre rule where the threading is somehow some constant something, meaning that a metric thread standard of M12 will strangely have fewer threads per centimeter on a larger diameter bolt and have more threads per centimeter on smaller diameters! I still don’t understand it.
But I found a metric bolt that somewhat fit – it was loose, but it also wouldn’t fall out. So I wrote down its specifications and searched online for a lamp nipple with similar metrics. I found one and ordered it – the email said it would arrive in a few days. Then the next day an email said it would arrive a day sooner. Then two days after the first arrival date there was an email saying it was delayed and expected a week later, so this sounded increasingly like it would never arrived but it eventually did.
I finally found some metric nuts that would match it in yet another hardware store in another state (because the nearby ones never bother to restock their empty metric hardware bins). And with a bunch of washers – not including the two I bought for 78¢ that the cashier rang up for a total $1.17! (“I don’t question the computer” she said when I questioned it) – I finally put the lamp back together:
And none of this several months long frustration would have been needed if the stupid lamp was made to any international lamp standards in the first place!
Orthallelous 
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