A nice Christmas gift but the pricker was broken. I have cleaned it up a bit and got it going and I am quite pleased with it, despite two hairline cracks in the rim which luckily don't go into the fount itself. My 'guess' is about mid to late 50s for when it was made. I was really pleased that my home made pricker part worked first go as it was the first I have ever attempted. Runs quite well and fairly bright. The Golden Anchor 4D mantle worked very well. Metal pump handle. The unit has the earlier hook on the bail but is NOT an earliest model which has many differences. How it arrived. The pricker control wheel. Gunked up prior to cleaning and as it arrived. The pricker wire 0.006" was mashed into a small 1 mm brass rod using a ball and pein hammer. The small tube was then cut with the dremel and fed into the 1.95 mm brass tube which had a hole already in it but was cleaned out with a 1 mm drill bit. I then crimped the smaller brass rod into the bigger one using electrical swage tool 1.25 mm You can see the swaging indents and I have marked off where I have to use the 9BA die to cut the correct thread. The finished threaded pricker. I didn't have to get rid of the flat part near the top wire as it fitted inside the nipple OK. I did have to cut off 3 mm of the protruding pricker wire. I used some instructions as a guide provided by @ROBBO55 and that was very useful. Thanks @ROBBO55
Iain, the lantern has cleaned up well and nice work making the pricker. I like the use of the crimping tool, congratulations
Thanks for the kind comments. The trickiest part was using the 9BA die (0.075" and 65.1 tpi) which I turned by hand without the usual handle because it was such an odd size old die that I purchased. Key was to file a bit of a taper on the brass tube and then it all worked. I was surprised how hard I had to beat the smaller brass tube to firmly fix the 0.006" wire too. Overall worth a try if you have a missing pricker wire.
Brass work hardens so it may be it became harder and harder the more you hit it. Heating and quenching it during the process would soften it but not sure how the pricker wire would survive being heated.
