One thing leads to another....

[collecture]

I have these two barber poles by Rose Supply Company in my game room. I turn them on at parties usually. I've had them on the wall for about 8 years now and a light recently burned out in one of them. There has always been this annoying rattle that one of the spinning tubes would make intermittently. The bottom of the tube has a cast iron nipple that fits into a cup attachment on the motor at the bottom and the top has a fiber board piece screwed onto each side of the tube. Through the center of the fiber board is a shaft that has the light on the end of it. So every time I turned them on, this rattle would start around the fiber board and light shaft. If I put slight pressure on it, it would stop. So I glued a heavy fender washer to it thinking the weight would do the trick, but no - it came back shortly
So I was digging around for an idea of what to do. I opened up a small drawer - my oddball drawer as I call it. All of a sudden my eye caught this spring form. I knew exactly what it was as I had borrowed one from Ken B. to make one for my Ideal 35 coin mech. It was a spring for the coin return plunger. I guess I got it with a bunch of parts and never know what it was. So I take my newly found original spring out and put it on my 35 and I come back in with my duplicate and it hit me.
So I make a spring form to mount under a screw and bent slightly down to put some pressure on the spinning tube. It worked like a champ! I did it for both just for the heck of it. Also took the opportunity to wire them more user friendly. I wired them the way they were when I bought them with the wire nuts behind, which meant I had to take the whole thing off the wall to service it. Now I just remove the top cap to change the light bulb/tube or adjust pressure on the spring. Removing the bottom cap gives access to the motor. It is the way it was designed, but I didn't put much thought into it before.
Very happy with the way they are now! It is the little things that make us happy sometimes!

[tkaz]

That's good stuff Tom, necessity is the mother of invention...my wife likes to remind me of how much junk I save in jars and boxes in the workshop, and I always remind her of every time I fix something with a piece from inside those jars...currently I'm winning the battle.