Our house came with two very nice (and presumably expensive) pendant lights above the kitchen island. Over the last month, both stopped working. At first I did the obvious thing and replaced the bulb, but that didn't work. Then I replaced the transformer. Still no good. So I realized I needed to troubleshoot a little more methodically, and I got my multimeter out. I've only taken one apart, but it appears to me that there's a break somewhere in the cable near the bulb end. If I wiggle the socket, I can get the meter to read continuity, but it's intermittent. So I'm thinking I need to replace that part. However, unless I'm missing something, it looks like the bulb socket itself is part of the cable. Photo: Is this something I'm actually going to be able to replace without replacing the entire fixture? What exactly do I need to look/ask for? Anything else to try first?

If you have screw in recessed can fixtures and want to visualize the mini pendants without doing the can tearout first--you can pick up a couple of recessed can/mini pendant light conversion kits--Lowes carries a couple (nickel Model #: MPA-1PNK or antique bronze [Model #: MPA-1JBZ]) with no bulb or shade that screws into the existing edison socket, has a decorative base that covers the recessed can. You can play with different light shades as well. We did this for our remodel, and never bothered to do the formal can tearout. I think there may be other conversion kits at Lowes, but the cover and the shade did not match our kitchen. Hope this helps.

Worth X-posting to lighting forum. Initial reaction--you're asking a lot of track pendants. We used to have a fluorescent box like yours. Hideously ugly, but it put out a ton of ambient light. Pendants are best suited for task downlighting--i.e. over an island. They do not typically put out much uplight, and often use relatively small bulb wattages. Unless you use a ton of big pendants, you'll end up with very spotty and uneven diffuse ambient lighting. Other thoughts would be to couple pendants with some source of ambient lighting: either wall sconces, if practical, or some type of larger ceiling mounted fixture. There are, it is true, big pendants that provide uplighting, like the ones we used: but even with these, we added a ton of recessed cans to ensure adequate light.

I can't really make out how the globes attach to the fixture from the pictures. Normally I would think a washer inside the globe would work, but that doesn't look possible with the new globe. But, I think that you could attach a washer, if you can find one that is large enough yet has the opening size that you need, to the top of the globe. Maybe something brass so it looks like it should be there. You would need a very strong, permanent adhesive, something like JB Weld.