Yep I did 8 at one time

@@BROKEN.WRENCH.GARAGE oo

Agreed for sure

This is what scrappers do, at least it is common here in Brazil, a country with a lot of social inequality and poverty. Here practically 100% of metal waste is recycled due to its considerably high value.

You are completely correct other than when you put a modern Preheat/rapid start lamp in the fixtures both cathodes actually survive. I even tried one shunted and one regular lamp to put the full ballast current on one cathode and it still survived, although glowing considerably brighter

@@BROKEN.WRENCH.GARAGE thank you for sharing your experience and knowledge about these old and obscure fixtures and lamps. I would have only guessed that the cathode wouldn't hold the ballast line voltage/current when inserted into a bi-pin instant start fixture. I enjoy learning new things from other lighting collectors on KZbin. Since you mentioned the end was glowing considerably brighter, I wonder if that had the effect of slightly lowering the required starting voltage , acting like sort of a hybrid instant start/rapid start tube, if you will. I also wonder if using a modern rapid start F40 in a bi-pin instant start F40 fixture without shunting the sockets would result in an even shorter lamp life, than if all four sockets had been shunted so that no ballast input current could flow through the cathodes and make them glow brightly. I wonder when approximately the time period bi-pin instant start F40 fixtures fell out of fashion in favor of the somewhat more common F48T12 single pin lamps and sockets. Maybe like late 1950s???? I do know that the F40T12/CW/IS lamps were still available for replacement purposes until at least into the mid 1990s, they are listed in my 1993 GE lamp and ballast catalog, but none of my newer catalogs list them. My newest GE catalog is from 2016 and it has F48T12 lamps listed, essentially the modern day equivalent to the F40T12 /IS, since they both, along with the 60 inch F40T17 /IS are compatible with the same ballast. If you still have any F40T12 /IS lamps laying around and a slimline ballast for F48T12, I think it would be cool of you to do some demonstrations of them alongside a standard F40T12 lamp, in a future video. Your other many subscribers will probably appreciate it as well .

​@Sparky-ww5re will do! I don't have any F48 slimline lamps but I can run f40 IS lamps on a slimline ballast sometime for a video if you'd like

@@BROKEN.WRENCH.GARAGE sure that would be awesome, since this upload was the first time ever seeing a F40 /IS in a photo or video. I have however, seen a couple of different F48T12 slimline lamps in other youtube videos, and one lighting collector had a pair of ultra rare F24T12 slimline lamps operating in a strip light, magnetic ballast from about 2009, some of the very last magnetic fluorescent ballasts manufacturered before being banned due to federal minimum evergy efficiency standards (thank you, Government for taking one more freedom of choice away from me in the name of "saving me $$$ on my electric bill and protecting the climate " 😂🤬) and he had to remove the bi-pin sockets and install single pin sockets because he couldn't find any purpose built F24T12 fixtures. I've also seen a F40T17/CW/IS lamp on an upload from about 10 years ago, running off a F32T8 electronic instant start ballast wired for 2x overdrive. If you decide to upload a video of a F40 /IS lamp in the future, I along with your other subscribers would probably like to see a standard F40 operating next to it with the end glowing brighter as a demonstration on how an F40/IS lamp is really just a rapid start F40 with shunted end caps making them electrically equivalent to a slimline F48 and hence the slightly shorter rated life than a slimline F48 as listed in my 1993 GE catalog, because all slimline lamps have more robust cathodes to tolerate the higher striking voltage better than rapid start /preheat)

What old school is this at?

Like white noise for us light collectors lol

Yep! Been up there since the 70s and still works great. If the lamp didn't suffer fall damage it would've probably still worked too lol

70 watts

Date code I think

​@@BROKEN.WRENCH.GARAGEok gracias

I've had good luck with mh lamps on mv ballasts of their respective wattages.. in fact the church I do lighting work for has a 175w westinghouse nema head street light on a pole with a sylvania metal arc 175w lamp installed... which I did myself. And on the other part of the building there are 2 MH prove start wall packs I put mercury lamps in and both are running great no issues

From what I have read on the Lighting-Gallery forum, some European collectors have said that they can get probe start metal halide lamps to run properly if they use a same wattage mercury vapor ballast in conjunction with a low voltage 2 wire parallel ignitor such as the Philips SI51 to help improve starting reliability over time in order to maximize the lamp’s usable life. The low voltage ignitor technique has been used in Europe because of the fact that a simple choke ballast is a way more efficient and economical ballast option compared to developing a dedicated autotransformer ballast with a slightly higher secondary voltage like what is available in North America.

@@worldwidehidcollectorusa3519 thank you for sharing your knowledge. I enjoy learning new stuff from other lighting collectors from around the globe In European countries, since they already use 230V, 50Hz power supplies or 230/400V 3 phase, as compared to North America's 120/240V, 120/208V 3 phase (or 277/480V only found in larger office buildings and large commercial and industrial buildings) it only makes sense they would use the simplest ballasts possible. Although I have to admit, I used to always wonder why other countries used preheat ballasts for 4 foot and larger fluorescent lamps long after the 2 lamp rapid start F40 ballasts became one of the most common ballasts in North America for decades, even lasting into the F32T8 electronic instant start era.

@@Sparky-ww5re As far as I know, preheat fluorescent ballasts are also way simpler than that of rapid start ballasts in terms of their design and the European ones have been wired in series with the tube. Just so you know, I think that a vast majority of countries in the world have adopted European spec lighting. It is also good to know that some Latin American countries and Japan have also been known to use a mix of preheat and rapid start ballasts well into the modern era. Sadly, whenever I have been trying to find knowledge about the unique lighting for the Japanese market, I have seen ZERO collectors native to Japan on LG or Facebook. In those cases, I have often relied on lamp catalogs, lamp spec sheets, Japanese lighting websites, and imported lighting equipment owned by me and other collectors to gain knowledge on Japanese lighting. For many of these sources, I often use Google Translate to read the information in English after taking screenshots. However, I have happily seen a few native Japanese lighting collectors on youtube such as FKT, shimo shimo, and MLZ; but virtually all their content is in Japanese. Even for the Japanese lighting youtubers, I also have to use Google Translate to read subtitles in English if I have closed captions turned on.

Is that one of the cheapo ebay ones? I have one too I got for like 16 bucks on ebay. And yeah they get way hotter than mh lamps because that dark woods glass traps heat in

@@BROKEN.WRENCH.GARAGE I don't know that my 400W MV blacklight is a cheapo per se, it's says American DJ and I paid $46 off Amazon. It does however have an E40 base, BT39 shape. Which leads me to believe that it was really designed to run off a European or similar ballast used in 220 -240V 50Hz countries. On the flipside, it was described as a replacement lamp for the UV cannon, popular (or used to be) at large nightclubs and what have you. I would imagine these were most popular from the late 1980s - mid 1990s with the rise of electronic music, notably when Eurodance and House music marked the peak of the rave scene and nightclubs in major US cities across the US and abroad. Regardless, all I had to do to my Hang-A-Light was replace the EX-39 socket with E39, and disconnect the ignitor and the M155 ballast seems to have no issue with running the MV blacklight. The first MV blacklight I ordered, I used it with the ignitor, and during hot restrike time it struck an arc between the leads in the glass stem near the base, melting it and destroying the lamp. This is something to keep in mind if using a pulse start MH ballast to operate a probe start MH or MV.

Black light bulbs get hotter than standard bulbs, even if it’s an HID bulb. My 75-watt Philips got up to 490 degrees Fahrenheit with the base up compared to a regular soft white coated 75-watt bulb, which got up to 320 degrees Fahrenheit with the base up. In horizontal position, light bulbs will get even hotter.

Haven't really measured it but the UV coming off of it feels hot about a foot away

@@BROKEN.WRENCH.GARAGE That’s pretty hot. My 500-watt halogen flood light is even hotter. I can feel the heat a few feet away. It measures close to 700 degrees Fahrenheit on the glass cover. It’s not even the bulb. Those things get scary hot. Metal halide is very hot on the outside, but not as near as bad as halogen for whatever reason. Of course, the halogen light is a lot smaller. I bet the 1,500 watt metal halide bulb is at least 600 degrees Fahrenheit on average. Even the back of my halogen flood light gets so hot that I can barely touch it. It will definitely burn curtains and other combustible easily.

I believe this one actually came with another spare GE SA-201 that I used for parts.. and a bird flew into it. But the original refractor is in safe keeping in the attic of my shop