<VV> headlights my way

[Tony Underwood]

At 04:45 PM 8/23/2010, J R Read_HML wrote:
>Never did it myself, but I've seen many with just one landing light in the
>high beam socket.  Probably plenty sufficient.
>Later, JR


The popular trick back when was to mount a single Lucas Flamethrower 
lamp in one HB socket.   It was all you needed...   ;)  A local 
chapter member's '66 Corsa turbo ragtop has one and it's impressive.

Others later on discovered that you could pick up some of those 
flatface "Q-Beam" hand-held spotlights that were amazingly bright, 
and used bulbs that also would fit a standard headlamp socket and 
mount.    They used about 25 amps of current each, however... wiring 
had to be perfect along with switches or you'd cook something in 
short order.   They also got very hot.

I'd at first suspected they were aircraft landing lights but the 7" 
versions had a high-low filament in them just like a standard 7" 
headlight bulb but were leaps and bounds brighter.   There are still 
some of those flatface 5.25" diameter Q-Beam lights floating around 
here and there that have a bulb sporting a single filament that will 
fit a HB socket in something like a Corvair.   A pair of these nasty 
little suckers will certainly need a relay switched feed to keep from 
cooking dimmer-headlight switches.   They also need some serious wire 
to feed them.   I'd not rely on the HLPT to feed them without melting.

Then again, when would a Corvair need 400,000 candlepower high beams?

I had a 7" Q-Beam spotlight that ate the cigarette lighter socket in 
my Plymouth.  I wired a Cinch-Jones socket under the dash, straight 
from the battery, put a matching plug on the spotlight, worked 
well.   Another guy and I used to ride down 10th Street here in town 
flashing our spotlights at the streetlight sensor switches which 
fooled them into thinking it was daylight, turning the street lights 
off, leaving the street blacked out until the mercury vapor lights 
refired again, usually took about 10-15 seconds.    We had some time 
on our hands, weekends...

An old acquaintance who used to be the chief engineer at a radio 
station I worked for had a basement full of mil-surplus hardware, 
most of it electronic... including a landing light off what he said 
was a C-124 Globemaster cargo plane.   It was a foot in diameter and 
was powered by a 28 volt transformer he'd found that was the size of 
a shoebox.   He used it to light up the basement for cleaning and 
maintenance etc of the equipment he had in the basement.   The place 
looked like a surveillance spy lab.   The lamp was pointed at a white 
wall which glared bright enough to flood the basement like it was 
noontime sun in July.

He once showed me how the lamp would burn a hole through a piece of 
newspaper held in front of it.   I asked how much brighter it might 
have been if it was running off pure DC and he said he wouldn't ever 
know because he had no rectifier diodes on hand that would handle 
that much current nor filter caps large enough to keep ripple off the 
output.


That would be the sort of headlight that will make oncoming traffic 
dimmit, dammit.   He said he used to have two but dropped and broke 
one and glass shards flew in all directions with a whump.   That's a 
sizeable amount of vacuum to collapse in on itself if a bulb that 
size got dropped on a concrete floor.

His name was Worth Barker and he was in the "frequency measuring 
business" with contracts to measure the broadcast signals transmitted 
by a number of area radio stations for their monthly FCC operations 
reports.   He certified that they weren't overmodulating and that 
they were within specs for channel allocation freq. as well as 
several other measurements that the commission required from its licensees.

He was an interesting guy.



tony..