Industrial Pipe Robot Lamp - How To Make Your Own - Part 2

My apologies for taking a few weeks for part 2 of this Industrial Pipe Robot Lamp. It has been busy around our household. Sickness took me down for a couple of weeks. Jon-Michael is getting married this fall with lots to do right now to finalize plans. He just changed jobs and bought a house. As you can imagine, there was a lot of chaos around our home. But here’s the second part as promised. You can find Industrial Pipe Robot Lamp – Part 1 ◄ here.

Industrial Pipe Robot Lamp – Part 2

 Disclaimer – A word of caution here, work with a licensed electrician or a certified professional to help with wiring your lamp. We are not responsible for any action taken as a result of the information or advice on MyHumbleHomeandGarden.com.

Robot Lamp Head

We used a 2 amp 250 volts bipolar light bulb base. With this light bulb base/socket, it shouldn’t matter which wire connects to the hot and which one connects to the neutral.

* You will also need Heat shrink tubing. Use 1/8″ from the light bulb base to the switch and 3/16″ from the two lamp cord connections since the lamp cord is a little larger.

We brainstormed to figure out what to use to attach the light socket to the coupling for the head. The cone shape was bad. It was difficult to glue to the coupling, with not enough surface area touching for gluing.

Jon-Michael came up with the idea of using a Bausch and Lomb contact lens case lid. It snapped onto the light socket perfectly! This also places an insulator between the socket and the coupling, which is a good thing.

Measure the distance between the two wires from each other and mark the contact case lid the same way.

Next, using the two markings you have just made, carefully drill a hole at both of these marks. A 1/8″ drill bit should work fine for this.


***Place the contact case lid on a flat surface when drilling it. You can hold it in place with your Channellock. DO NOT Hold it in your hand while drilling!!! This picture is just to give you a better view of what was done.

Wipe off or sand down any plastic burrs that are leftover from drilling the two holes.

Gently guide one wire through each of the holes made in the previous step, pulling out the slack until the socket can be”snapped” in place.

When the lens lid snaps over the end of the socket, it should hold snuggly and look something like this.

Next, taking the 2″ to 1/2″ coupling, guide the wires into the large opening of the coupling and out through the 1/2″ opening. Center this to the best of your ability.

Stir up a little bit of epoxy glue. Allow it to set up just a little bit to thicken. Then, using a wooden skewer, chopstick, or the little paddle that comes with the epoxy, apply glue all around the socket, creating a little well of epoxy. Be careful not to get any epoxy on the threads!

Place the coupling with the socket in a glass or container (one that you aren’t worried about ruining if you get epoxy on it) so the wires extending from the bottom of the coupling hang freely.

***Before the epoxy has set up, center the socket as best you can. Once the epoxy has set up, where it is, is where it’s going to stay.

Robot Lamp Arms

Taking the body assembly from Part 1 of the robot lamp instructions, add a 1-1/2-inch nipple on either side of the cross fitting.

Use V-jaws to tighten slightly. You want them snug but don’t overtighten now.

Next, thread on a 90-degree elbow to each of the nipples installed in the previous step. Again, tighten these until snug, but do not overtighten.

Take the 2-1/2″ pipe nipples and thread one into each of the 90-degree elbows from the previous step. Go ahead and tighten these.

Lastly, for the arms, add a 1/2″ pipe cap onto the pipe nipples from the previous step and tighten.

The Lamp Cord

On the specific lamp cord used for this robot lamp project, the ribbed wire is the Neutral. The smooth wire on the cord we used is the HOT wire! It also has black wording on it. (Be sure to check the package for which wire is hot on the cord you use.)We wrapped a small piece of black electrical tape around the hot wire for easier identification.

The ends of this cord were soldered. You need to cut the soldered ends off and strip them with wire strippers.

To make working with the wire easier, we pulled the hot and neutral wires apart until both wires were about 9-inches each.

After separating the wires, we double-checked that the wires would be long enough by holding them to the body of the pipe lamp. If you use different fittings, your wires may need to differ in length.

***Before running the wire in this next step, make sure to thread your NM Connector into the bottom of the cross. Run the existing black wire through the Connector as you do, so that it can be soldered later. We forgot this piece as we made our lamp and ended up having to cut all of our soldered pieces and resolder. This was not fun! Learn from our mistakes!

Carefully run the neutral wire of the lamp cord up through the NM Connector, into the bottom of the cross-piece, through the body, and finally out the neck of the robot.

Now, you should have the neutral wire from the lamp cord and one black wire from the switch protruding from the neck of the robot.

Take the “head” of the robot (the coupling with the light socket,) run the ends of the coupling wires through your 1/2″ 45-degree street elbow, and thread the elbow onto the existing nipple.

Both socket wires should now be sticking out the end of the street elbow. (In hindsight, there was probably an easier way to do this step. You can see that it doesn’t allow very much room for mistakes when soldering.)

Soldering and Heat Shrink Tubes

Before soldering the wires in the next step, make sure to put a piece of heat shrink tube on both the neutral wire and the black switch wire…

…exposing the wire far enough to allow for soldering.

Then, solder the black wire to one of the light socket wires. Next, solder the remaining light socket wire to the neutral wire of the lamp cord.

***You want to use enough solder to keep the wire together, but not so much that you can’t fit the heat shrink tubing over it!

Carefully work the heat shrink tubing over the soldered joint and center it over the joint. You want to have a little heat shrink covering both of the wires.

You should have something that ends up looking like this for both soldering connections.

Next, use a heat gun to shrink the heat shrink tubing in place. (You can also use a hairdryer for this.) Watch carefully as the tubing shrinks. When it stops shrinking, stop heating it. It should be snug on both wires when it is finished.

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Wrap the street elbow with 3-4 turns of Teflon tape, (pipe tape).

Rotate the elbow 1 – 1/2 turns counterclockwise and carefully insert into the top cross-piece and tighten. (The reason for turning counterclockwise is it prevents the wires inside from being over twisted when tightening the elbow into the cross fitting. You never want wires to be in a bind as it stresses the connections.)

Solder the remaining wire from the lamp cord (the HOT wire) to the remaining switch wire and heat shrink just as you did in the previous steps.

Remember to slide the 3/16″ heat shrink tubing on the wire before soldering!

NM (Non-Metallic) Connector

Carefully work the lamp and switch wire back up into the base of the robot lamp. (The solder joint should be concealed inside the lamp base.)

An NM Connector is a non-metallic connector and is also called a Romex connector.

Slide the NM Connector up the lamp cord and thread it into the cross fitting. Make sure to loosen the two screws on the NM Connector to allow it to spin freely so as not to twist the lamp cord.

Finally, tighten the screws on the NM Connector to hold the wire in place. Make sure they are snug, not overtightened! Once this is complete, the wire is held in place and the connector will help prevent accidentally pulling the cord out.

Your robot lamp is now complete.

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