Rewiring A Juntion Box

Yes, I know, I've been absent here lately. Apparently the Brown Recluse Spider bite threw me off my game more than I realized, but hopefully I'm nearly back - although still sometimes a little foggy in logic. Here's a for instance: I suppose I could have gone out and just ordered a new junction box. If I had paid myself for the time, materials, and toil it would have been less expensive. But there's that nagging thing in my head that says I can fix this, and save the resources.

 

When repairing these old boxes the real tricky part is to make sure the parts line up exactly as they were taken off or else the 'motor' and 'light' lettering may end up upside down, or worse yet the plugs get switched.

On this particular box the old wires had a last bit of good insulation right at the end where they attach to the copper leads. In a way I found this fortunate because I could cover the old wire, new wire, and solder joint with shrink wrap. The tools I used were: wire cutter/strippers, flux, solder, soldering gun, solder stand, shrink wrap, a butane lighter and new wire.

I made sure to mock up where my hands were going with a hot soldering gun tip and where that tip gets laid down to cool.  After setting everything up I gave it a practice run before plugging in the iron. And, as usual, I had a moist sponge anchored down to clean the solder tip.

Since this box includes both the cord plug to the outlet and the pedal cord... I know that these would be considered high wear items and I should use the heavier insulation wire. The norm for this would be AWG 16 gauge with the SPT-2 coating.

I also know that I'm working on a vintage sewing machine power cord, and that one lead is going to run from this junction box to the wall outlet. When I sat down to figure out just how long that cord was going to be I considered several factors.

The length of a power cord can have fractional effects on the amperage supplied to the machine and also, as the power cord length increases so does the possibility of heat build-up. I realize that vintage electric foot pedals can fail and fires have happened. I took all this into consideration and made the power cord a reasonable length, and no longer. I am usually in the habit of unplugging my VSM after every use, but I also use a fused outlet with a switch. This is what I will have to do until I get the chance to replace vintage pedals with new electronic ones.