Tried repairing a broken lamp and it's weirdly dim - high resistance in wire?
Likely is a bad switch, or a bad connection.
Unlikely is &quot;high resistance wire&quot;
And if you are planning to &quot;put your engineering degree to use&quot; please learn the difference in line connected items between &quot;neutral&quot; (Grounded) and &quot;ground&quot; (Grounding - safety ground - whole different thing.)
Your safest bet if low on real world experience is to rewire it as low-voltage DC. That way if you spork it up nobody gets hurt. Far too many internet tutorials are terrible, and if you don't know enough it's hard to sort the terrible form the good, and terrible can be quite unsafe...