Aristocrat fail……overhaul

My Aristocrat lamp has run daily for 8 hours (timer) since I bought it new in 1990. It faded, got bubbles in the lava and had black looking flakes near the spring and sometimes they floated up. When I removed the
Lava Lite bottle cap I found the failure.
The plastic seal had a hole about in the center. Water had leaked in and rusted the cap. Some rust particles pushed through the hole
and fell into the bottle. I will replace
the seal, which came out easily, with some Teflon sheet. It is 0.5mm thick and cut to the same size
as the old seal. It's just the right hardness and is very heat/chemical resistant. I’ve already figured
out how to swage the cap on. Use a
metal hose clamp that will squeeze the bottle cap equally on the ridges. I used it on the clear/black lamp and it
worked very well. The cap wouldn’t even
rotate.