At work we have several lighting kits based on the inexpensive Smith Victor 765UM 600 watt halogen open-face light. They are reasonably well made lights for the money, but they have a critical flaw: Instead of a metal screen to keep fingers off the bulb, they have a “safety glass” disc that rattles around behind the barn doors and just generally feels like an afterthought. It fits loosely so it can expand and contract, but during transit it sometimes gets wedged in the fingers of the mount and shatters unexpectedly after the light warms up. After a few years of warning students to make sure the safety glass is indeed “safe”, we came up with a fix:
- Buy some high-temp silicone tubing with an 1/8″ ID & 1/4″ OD. (McMaster Carr # 51135K16)
- Slit along the length of the tubing. I made a tubing cutter by soldering an exacto blade to the shaft of a nail. I clamped it into a vise and used both hands to pull the tubing over the blade.
- Wrap the tubing around the circumference of the glass disc.
- Where the ends meet, clip a 3/4″ binder clip onto the seem.
- Remove the chrome handles from the binder clip.
(You don’t need glue. The clip is very hard to remove.)
- Now put the light back together. It will be hard to wedge the disc back into its channel, but it will work.
