BULB DISCUSSION BOARDS > Antique Bulb Discussion

Repairing old bulbs

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James:
How often have you found some special old bulb, only to find that its tip has been knocked off rendering it pretty much useless?  A few weeks ago on Ebay I noticed a couple of auctions for old street-series carbon lamps, one of which had suffered such damage and was attracting no interest at all, despite its beautiful internal construction with blue-glass insulators on the stem.

The price was ridiculously low for a lamp of this type so I decided to have a go at repairing it myself and thought other forum members might be interested to see the results!  I'd also be interested to hear anyone's comments on the ethics of repairing old bulbs, even if the repair can be carried out in precisely the same fashion as the bulb would have been originally made.

Anyway, shown below are some pics I took during the process, which proves that this kind of thing certainly is feasible.  Let me know what you think, and if anyone should have some rare old bulb that has a missing tip, it might well be worth taking it to a skilled local glassblower.

   

BTW I didn't get the vacuum quite good enough in this particular one, hence the blue glow when coil testing is a fair bit stronger than I would like.  The lamp will still work fine but next time I'll know they need a more thorough attempt to outgas the glass.

James.


Okay well photopoint seems to be playing up a bit at the moment, but if you point your browser to http://albums.photopoint.com/j/View?u=1148573&a=8437387&p=51671324&Sequence=0&res=high  the pics seem to come up fine.

[This message has been edited by James (edited July 11, 2001).]

[This message has been edited by James (edited July 11, 2001).]

Bob Masters:
James,

Ha Ha Ha.......this is drivng me nuts !
I wanna see this groundbreaking experiment.
This could be the beginning of something BIG.
Imagine someone deliberately removing the tip to gain acess to a broken filament, then repairing the tip like you describe........
just imagine the implications........

WOWOWOWOWOWOWOW !
-Bob-

Bob Masters:
Food for thought..........

As for repairing old bulbs ?

Does restoring a vintage autombile diminish it's value ?

Is a faithfully restored vintage electric fan worth more, or less, than the same fan badly in need of restoration ?

Are we allowed to re-wind vintage electric motors ?

This is truly ground-breaking territory.

-Bob-

ALM:
Let's see here...  I have a non-working or broken bulb that is likely worthless to me...

I can - DO NOTHING - and it remains useless and worthless.

OR...

I can - FIX IT - and it works, thus, making it valuable/useful for the collection or for somebody else.

Fix it.  What "implications" should there be?  Let's be realistic, is somebody gonna hunker down and do this to several dozen, several hundred, or several thousand bulbs in an effort to "rip-off" collectors via resale with no disclosure?

I'm imagining that this is a painstakingly tedious process... and not one someone would use to negatively impact the value, the history, the collectibility of bulbs.

I have to go with Bob on this one... I can't imagine that it does anything except add value to the piece.

Chris W. Millinship:
Photopoint can be a pain in the toliet-muscle sometimes can`t it? James`s picture up there has never appeared for me- and I expect a good few others of you havn`t been able to see it either. Well I offered to host it for James so we can all finally see it- my new image host seems stable enough so Bob, you can stop drooling into your keyboard now   ...






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