>I have a few halagon tochre lamps.  Inevitably a contact on one side of
>the lamp becomes corroded (pitted, from electrical arcing I assume)
>after a year or so of use.

This seems to be a case of poor contact material selection on the
part of the lamp manufacturer.  Since they get really hot, I susepct
the real mechanism here is the heat plus oxidation of the contact -
arcing might come into play once they get wasted enough.

>This leads to poor and failing connections.
>I've tried sanding down the contacts, and replaced another set.

Sanding will only clean the corroded layer away, allowing the layer
under it to corrode.

BTW - are these lamps in an moist area, or an area that could
possibly have corrosives flying about?  I'm thinking basement, dry
cleaners, industrial, or bad a/c or bad humidity control here.  I
suspect that if you placed a contact near (like a few mm) the lamp
and ran the lamp, it'd corrode eventually too.

>I was wondering if there exists a good set of contacts which won't
>suffer from this problem, or if it could be alleviated with conductive
>electrical grease (and are there high temperature greases which would
>work well).

Who makes such a set, I don't know.  As for greases, there might be a
high temp type out there, but I'd be reluctant to try that as greases
tend to be flamable.

This might sound out of left field, but I'd give GE a call and ask
them about it.  Their lighting division probbably knows something
about this.

I bet the light socket you're using are cheapies made in a certain
pacific rim country that's near a certain large pacific rim country,
and isn't the certain pacific rim country known for high quality.

--
http://www.piclist.com#nomail Going offline? Don't AutoReply us!
email listserv@mitvma.mit.edu with SET PICList DIGEST in the body