Belly Glass Bulbs

[kb8yrw]

Okay my wife says I cannot leave anything alone...and she is right  So I have the old 1115 working perfectly except for a slightly wonky bell but that is because someone bent the clapper to hell to stop it from ringing  Anyway I really enjoy playing it but the lights in the belly glass bother me. There are 14 bulbs and you can see every one of them through the glass. It is like they are too close to the glass so instead of the belly being uniformly lite up there are 14 brighter spots. Is this normal? The belly had #44 bulbs and those almost seemed like they were touching the glass so I swapped them for #55 which have a slightly lower profile. That helped slightly but it seems it would look a whole lot better if there was more clearance. I looked at possibly moving the wood backer/bulb holder position back but doing so would cause an electrical clearance issue for the bulb feeds. Any suggestions or should I just leave it alone? 

[rokgpsman]

Is there room to remove the incandescent bulbs and put a single fluorescent tube in there? If it was a few inches behind the glass that might make the appearance to be more evenly lit. They make thin fluorescent tubes in different lengths, just need to add a couple of wires to get 115v to it, some of the fluorescent light tubes come with the power cord already attached. Also, there are diffuser panels made of milk-white plastic that can help even the lighting, it would install immediately behind the glass. I'm not familiar with your machine so don't know how much room there is behind the glass.

Another idea would be to try LED lamps in place of the incandescent bulbs, maybe there is an LED with diffuser lens that gives a softer & more scattered light. We had a piece of equipment at work that had little metal shields on the lamp holders half way around so that the light was reflected to the rear and then gave indirect lighting to the front, sort of like the "sconce" lighting fixtures. There were no bright spots on the glass from the lamp since there was no light going directly from the lamp forward. Below is a picture of a lamp shield used on some cars to give an idea what I'm talking about.

[DavidLee]

Those hotspots bug me also. A thin white diffuser might work if there is room, but it will cut down on the light emitted.
Another solution would be, replace the bulbs with flashing bulbs this would create a twinkling effect.
I have them in one of my machines, but there not in the belly. There behind the top glass around the perimeter, looks pretty good.
Keep us posted on what you did to solve the hotspots.
   

[ramegoom]

Below is a picture of a lamp shield used on some cars to give an idea what I'm talking about.

Wow! Those shields were my design. Goes back to 1995 when I first manufactured them. Sold thousands over the years. They were designed to fit an HID D2S bulb into a standard H4 headlight housing. Used them on motorcycle headlights and H4 car headlights. The beam would cut sharply and light only the top half of the headlight, with a slight angle difference on one side to illuminate the shoulder of the roadway.

Nothing to do with belly glass lighting though.

[DoubleZero]

I tend to be a perfectionist on my machine lighting as well. However, I think there's something cool about the imperfect lighting on these older machines - it just matches the vintage style. IMO, diffusers and especially LEDs would kill that effect. Put me down as one vote for leaving it as it is.

[rokgpsman]

Below is a picture of a lamp shield used on some cars to give an idea what I'm talking about.

Wow! Those shields were my design. Goes back to 1995 when I first manufactured them. Sold thousands over the years. They were designed to fit an HID D2S bulb into a standard H4 headlight housing. Used them on motorcycle headlights and H4 car headlights. The beam would cut sharply and light only the top half of the headlight, with a slight angle difference on one side to illuminate the shoulder of the roadway.

Nothing to do with belly glass lighting though.

That's really cool that you were behind those light shields!   

We had something similar but smaller in some of our equipment at Rockwell, they were used to cause the equipment instrument dials to be more readable at night without overly bright lights that could give away the person or his vehicle's presence.