I bought what I (and the seller) thought was a rusty ship light for 30 euros to restore it. After doing some research on ebay etc., I found the lights were probably from a nuclear submarine and worth well over 200 euros. Pretty great find. And it was a lot of fun to restore it even though all the rusted bolts and screws gave me some gray hair. The disassembly on this project took a lot of time. Probably half of the screws were so badly stuck I was almost not able to open them and some of them broke. Even after soaking the parts in rust remover some of those would rather brake than open. I drilled those holes open and made new threads for those. I also had to make most of the broken screws by myself but I left that out from the video. Basically I used a normal screw as a base and rounded the heads and cut them to desired length. Rounded tops are not common these days so I couldn’t find any of those from shops near me. After I had used rust remover I used paint stripper to remove the old paint. The parts were painted with light gray, like it originally was. This paint doesn’t need a base coat underneath. I didn’t fill/file all the casting marks to keep the original look and because I fell this type of item doesn’t need to be all completely even and shiny. That would also have required me to remove a lot of material as there were some deep pits from the casting process. I also nickel plated all the steel parts that were left outside the shell to protect those from rusting again. I had to do a slight modification for the electronics. The lamp originally had some wire running to other lamps but since I only had one lamp I decided it’s better to remove those rather than leave cut wires with live electricity inside the lamp. I thought it would be fun to add an alarm noise and time relay to the switch so it would have this alarm effect like there was an emergency or a missile launch.
Home Workshop Madness Nuclear Submarine Light Restoration. Cold War Restoration
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