Can this lamp be saved?

 

I was raised to patch and repair (“use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without”) and am tickled by how fashionable I must seem in today’s economy, where improvisational mending is now viewed as gallery-worthy art. My handier half and I have our own repair clinic right in the kitchen, where we recently operated on a burr coffee grinder that was paralyzed when a bit of metal got caught in its throat. So when our nine-year-old Tolomeo Micro table lamp fell off its bedside perch, snapping its swiveling, articulated arm in half, no way we were throwing it into a landfill.

Setting that broken arm, however, proved much harder than we thought, making me wonder whether other people are having similar problems prolonging the lives of their high-end home accessories. (Not to mention their homes: please see This Old House's "Black and Blue Thumb Awards.")  The manufacturer, Artemide, was happy to send us a new “lower arm assembly” —in return for $35.65 plus $8.33 tax and handling, thank you. But here’s where two minds and four hands met their Waterloo.

To make the lamp whole again required perfectly aligning three small holes in the interlocking upper and lower arms, two razor-sharp washers, a springy guide-wire, a tiny bolt, and a little round, knurled nut. After a dozen tries that left our fingertips bleeding, we finally managed to line everything up, only to have the arm snap off in the exact same place. A phone call to Artemide went unanswered, and dead silence greeted our sentiment-filled handwritten letter to its department of parts and repairs. All of which I mention not only because I like to unload but because now may be the time for community self-help initiatives to spread across the land. In the old days, you took your broken whatever down the street. Today, even if the source is as prestigious as Artemide, you’re online and nobody’s home. If not in an art gallery, then maybe in a neighbor’s kitchen, people with varying skills could band together to help each other mend things. From each according to his skills, to each according to the needed repairs for her busted $250 lamp.