Antique-Style Electric Christmas Wreath Window Lights

[Corsetière]

I love them! Nice work!

[MJ1987]

I love them! Nice work!

Thanks! Sales are starting to pick up. In fact, we just shipped two to Canada. Our first international sale! Such exciting stuff. Maybe it was someone from THD. I know we have quite a Canadian crew on here

[phil]

at some point before you get too far into a commercial level you'll have to get UL approval, In Canada it's CSA. I think the standards are recognized by each other , there could be some differences. Not sure what expense is involved but I'm pretty sure that you cant' sell them legally without that. I know there have been cases of electrical items entering Canada from China with fake decals.
I think what you need is to go through the approval process to be permitted to use labels and things like a label stating maximum watts might come into play. They could refuse you for things you had not considered like if the wire insulation meets their standards. I bet bet they can be fussy but my only experience with it is if I have machines that have come from overseas without Canadian approval, then I call in a private company and they have a look and put a sticker on it. I just had a machine with a dual voltage motor but the machine tag did not agree with the voltage that the motor was wired to, and so I had to call a independent electrical safety approval contractor in just to put their official little sticker on the machine before electricians would connect it.

[1918ColonialRevival]

UL listing isn't required, especially for small devices like this. At least not in the US.

UL is just an "independent" tester. As someone who has worked in the test and evaluation world for decades, I'll say this. Data doesn't lie, but testers can. Even though it isn't right, some can be persuaded to look the other way under the right circumstances.

[phil]

That's cool , if you are a tester then you'll know this a lot better. I figured it would need a CSA or UL sticker because anything you buy off the shelf has it and an electrician will often check and refuse to touch stuff without the sticker. Im no stickler for stickers but I thought it could be disappointing if he sells them commercially and gets stuck on some legal garbage just for importing a handful of lights without approval or for example installs 50 cords to find later that they can't be sold like that.

with my old radios it is a bit funny because I have lots of old radios with approval stickers that are so old that insulation is rotting and things like that. lots have warnings that it is illegal to operate them without a license too Some people cut the plugs right off so that any person buying them will have to open them and replace the cord and presumably make it safe in the process.

there are a couple of mods we often do. one is to install a fuse on the line cord. the fuse should be on the little pin of the cord but old radios never had polarized plugs so they often add them so that the fuse can be on the "hot" side.

sometimes there is a capacitor between the chassis and one of the power leads and they use these "safety capacitors" sometimes there is an old cap there and it shorts , making the chassis live. the safety caps are supposed to not short or not fail not sure which. a wax cap can carry AC but it blocks DC until it fails then they often turn into a dead short or act like a resistor, sometimes heat up and blow up.. the electrostatics are a bit different but they fail even more spectacularly, often with a bang and a cloud of smoke. If you accidentally install them backwards they explode like that.

some of the AA5 radios had hot chassis.. the chassis was hot and the user was just protected by the knobs and the plastic of the case. that is scary but its how they were made.

there are safer ways to test radios, like to check them with a dim bulb tester or to install a solid state diode then ramp the power up slowly, to check at the plug if the thing is dead shorted.

in good practice, for bench work, we use a 1:1 isolation transformer. 110 in 110 out and it limits the potential since only an amp or two can be carried through he transformer windings. It offers some protection against electrocution. I normally power them up through that and through a variac so I can increase the voltage slowly and see what happens, if anything starts to fizzle or smoke. I connect an ammeter so I can see if they draw more than expected. Otherwise if you just plug an old radio in you can blow either the electrodynamic speaker or the transformer and both are hard to source and replace. radios use tube rectifiers so they wont really see any power to the radio circuit itself until the diode is operational and that takes about 70 volts or so.. so some install a solid state diode to make it so they do get low power and than after it proves ok they switch back to the original tube rectifier. usually the object is to see if it works at all without destroying any parts in the process.. it is expected that they can be rebuilt afterwards but if you are lucky that it actually works then troubleshooting is easier than if it's dead for 4 different reasons. when that happens it becomes a troubleshooting puzzle and a challenge or a "learning experience"

of course when people buy and sell radios the temptation often wins out and peole plug them in so it is not unusual to have an "event" that produces a cloud of stinky burned electrical smoke and some snickering...

lamps might not need polarized plugs. I had a whole lot of makita circular saws , the factory polarized plugs had an issue the prongs kept breaking off flush in the molded plug. It was a factory defect. I had piles of them after a while. I sent them all to the quality control guy from Makita. I could not find polarized plugs that take round cords but without a ground lug. I'm not supposed to install a grounded plug on a 2 wire cord.. at home that wouldn't' really bother me but its not to code. so the result was paying about 20 buck apiece for the factory cord with molded plug.
I bought some plugs like were used on these lamps but those only fit flat cords not round rubber cords like on the saws. It surprised me that these sort of plugs ( polarized ones without a ground and designed for a round cord) would be so hard to find. I tried several electrical vendors and they all came up with nothing.

I'm often a bit worried if I restore a radio and sell it as such and then it burns their house down would I be liable?

there is a bit of a running joke about radio collectors being "quick unpluggers" I was thinking of organizing a fun event for our radio club where I could connect several plugs in such a way that I could make a radio make smoke, like by shorting a resistor or a capacitor.. then tell them to unplug it at the first sign of issues.. I thought I could wire an old radio so they each have a cord and some way to tell if people pulled the plug before the issue or who got theirs out first after they saw smoke.. maybe win a prize.. Just a fun thing to make them all laugh and have a bit of excitement. maybe they could win a "quicker unplugger" award or something of the sort..
Im trying to figure out how to make a circuit that could detect who unpluged first. it could be turned on in sequence with the smoking component. maybe have a resistor that will make a loud pop and an electrolytic cap wired backwards so it blows up too.. so they see something dramatic happen inside the radio to prompt them to run to their plug and get it out. I need to sort out a way to prove who unplugged first..maybe some sort of a holding circuit with 5 cords and 5 flags so the first one to trigger theirs would get a flag and that would at the same time make the other other 4 flags not operate since the first one unlatched the holding circuit.. Its a bit of a weird puzzle..

The lamp looks really great. at first glance I figured it would be made of plaster so to make it from aluminum and brass, by casting must have been quite an undertaking. Its getting unusual to see anything good quality. so much is made in china to what I call ACAP standards ( as cheaply as possible)