Well, today I saved what I thought was a lovely old philips 3-tube fluorescent shop light from being thrown away in the metal scrap bin. quite an old one, from about 1958 if I understand date codes correctly! Quite frankly, I should probably have left it there, because the reflector was missing, and it also had a much more serious issue which I did not think about checking! I looked in the other scrap bins for the reflector for it but to no avail, so it likely was missing for a long time. Either way, looking the fixture over, all looked great aside from the missing reflector, so I thought to myself, I'll just make a new reflector myself. There are plenty of those fixtures still installed in other parts of the building still in service to this day so I went there and got some measurements of a reflector on a working fixture, and felt amazing and looked forward to fixing up mine when I got home. So back home after work, I quickly measured the ballasts with a multimeter, sure, the ohm readings seemed a bit low, but old ballasts usually have thicker copper wire inside them, so I did not think much about it. I connected up my test power cord, plugged it in, and pop goes the circuit breaker aswell as the RCD. okay, that old PFC capacitor is probably bad, so I disconnected it... still pops the breaker. Okay, hmm. Checking all the ballasts to ground, dead short. I trace it to the middle tube ballast, and disconnect it and isolate the wires safely, then plug back in. yay! the breaker does not pop, and there is no ground fault. The capacitor also does it's job, now showing a leading power factor on my electricity meter! Great! I pop in some starters into the two slots that should still work, plop in my test tubes, apply power and - BRRRRRRRR GRRRRRRRRRRR ARRRCCCCC! My test tubes EXPLODE. Well, they do not physically shatter and throw glass pieces everywhere, but they got ruined INSTANTLY. And the breaker popped. Impressive to pop a 10 amp breaker with just a fluorescent tube! Both test tubes, completely ruined, both cathodes melted, the evacuation stem even popped in one! Damnit!
all 3 ballasts, are SHOT. Dead. Not what I was expecting, because usuallly those really old ballasts are ultra reliable, and super rarely fail. But in this case, the fixture must have been exposed to overvoltage at some stage, or something. All 3 ballasts being shorted, and one being shorted aswell as having a ground fault, does not happen often. If one ballast had been bad and 2 good, I would have not thought much of it. But this is certainly unusual.
So.... I think to myself, What should I do. I don't really want to put the fixture back in the scrap bin, because the tube sockets and other parts in it are truly amazing. They are ceramic, and simply cannot go bad from UV damage. even the starter sockets are ceramic, and the connector blocks too! And being a simple shop light, making a reflector does not seem like a huge deal, and should not take me more than a couple hours to do in my workshop anyways, it is not a huge deal to get it back in shape at all. it is just basic metalworking, I won't be able to make it in one piece because I simply do not have a big enough sheet of aluminium, but, I was able to make it in 3 pieces, so I cut out 3 pieces to match the fixture's reflector area lenght. So... before going too crazy, I install 3 new old stock Helvar L40A ballasts. The legendary beasts that almost never die no matter what you do. Plop in 3 new test tubes, turn on the power, and it lights up absolutely beautifully. even the old and probably PCB filled capacitor is working properly, keeping the power factor at a super healthy 0.9 with cold tubes. Seeing the 3 test tubes blink to life happily on the new ballasts put a lot of joy into my heart, even though the fixture is incomplete, and now does not have the same vintage soul to it anymore.
At this point, I might aswell go all in. I'll mount those new ballasts properly and spend a few more hours making the reflector as perfect as possible, then I'll still have a really nice 3-tube shoplight that will perform just as well as it would have done originally, if not better.
it still feels a little wrong to pour this much effort into a fixture in this state, but... a light fixture made with this quality will never be made again. And with those ballasts I installed... I bet it will work for another 70 years with ease.
I'll upload some pictures of this project to my gallery later if anyone is interested
