Push interior part of the light socket (the part you just wired up) back into the top of the top part of the light socket. It will fit flush into the top of the socket, you may need to twist it some until you have it fitting just right. Now screw in the smooth plastic bottom part of the light socket into the top part of the light socket. You have now done all the hard work - pat yourself on the back.
The only last task left is to fit the outer metal socket cover over the internal thermoplastic light socket! To do this, just push the thermoplastic socket into the metal socket cover. The bottom part of the strain relief will go through the hole in the metal socket cup. (Note sometimes it can be hard to do this as the four prongs will not want to fit through the hole. What we often do is use a little tape to put around just the top prongs and insert it through the hole. Then we take the tape off.) All you have to do now is screw the top part of the strain relief onto the bottom threaded part of the strain relief. This makes sure that the everything is secure and makes sure that the socket is secured to the cloth wire. (Which is important because you don't want the two internal wires that are screwed into the internal socket to be holding all of the weight if you use a pendant light shade.)
Voila! You are done and have just wired your own light socket with metal light socket cover.
For this project today we used a plastic conical strain relief. But you aren't just limited to this. We have hundreds of lamp parts and lighting supplies, and that includes many different types of strain reliefs. We make metal strain reliefs in many colors and lenghts as well as plastic round cylinder shapped cable retainer strain reliefs. Those type of strain reliefs have a slightly different way to connect them to the light socket, but have no fear: even for those, the procedure for installing the light socket kit will be easy. The only difference will be in how to tighten the strain relief and adding a simple screw in tube. We’ll show you how to do that in another tutorial!
All clear? Did you finish the job or were there any difficulties? Let us know in the comments, and, as always, let us know which tutorials you'd like to see next!