Let There Be Light

I've been having some trouble lately with my reading lamp. I replaced the 40 watt fluorescent lamp with a 100 watt fluorescent lamp. It died after two hours use. I took it back to the store and they gave me a new one. I've been using that one for about a week, no problems.

A couple of days ago the switch started acting up. I had to wiggle it to get it to work. It made scary sparking noises, and finally ceased to function, electrically, at all.

I bought some new switch guts for it today, installed same, works fine.

I drilled out the rivets on the old one to see what was going on inside.



It looked ok, but when I loaded the picture into the computer and magnified it, I could see that one contact was not in the right place. You can see the contact on the right has sprung out of place. I don't' know if it was like that before I took the top of the switch, and it looks like it's making good contact anyway. I don't see any signs of arcing.

The only think I can think of is, maybe because the right-hand contact sprungded out on the left, there wasn't enough springy tension on the right where the contact makes contact with the piece that you can't see because it fell out.

So, I don't know what the problem was. All I know is the new one works fine.