This past week I discovered that the light fixture in our bathroom was coming apart at the seams. Since it appeared that it could completely break and fall on someone, I decided to fix it.
After getting the fixture down I began to work on it. There were two places where the glass frames were coming apart. I realized that I would have to cut off some of the existing glue to fix the fixture, so I grabbed my Xacto knife and began to do so. As I started to try and remove some of the glue, I noticed something odd: the glue wasn’t glue at all. It was lead. I found this to be pretty strange. I would’ve never guessed that’ve fixture would be held together by lead! I know that they use lead to fixate glass in stained glass windows, but this light fixture has little metal frames around each pane of glass so the lead is not necessary. Either way, I began to cut away at the lead.
Once I removed enough lead I began to close up the cracks. I pushed the two pieces of glass that were seperating together and used some tape to hold them there. I then did the same thing for the other crack that was forming. At this point I had the light fixture they way I wanted it, it just need to be glued up.
I decided to use 30minute to hold the fixture together, but when I was finished with the glue up I didn’t want spicy to be all over the glass. To fix this potential problem I took masking tape and covered every pane of glass on the inside of the fixture. Then using an xacto knife I cut around each pane of glass and pulled up the tape to expose just the metal frames that surround each glass pane. Knowing how messy epoxy can be, I went ahead and covered the outside o the fixture as well. To do this I just used some newspaper paper and taped it to the outside. Now I was ready for gluing.
I slipped on some latex gloves, mixed up my 30minute epoxy, and began to apply it to the inside of the light fixture. I put good amounts of glue on the cracks that were in the fixture. So I wouldn’t have to fix the fixture again in a few years, I went ahead and applied epoxy to every metal frame inside the fixture. I then left the epoxy alone to cure.
The next step was my favorite: removing all of the tape! I removed all of the masking tape which exposed perfect, epoxy free, panes of glass. This made me happy. I was then ready to go put the light fixture back in its home in the bathroom.
