Classic cars forum & vehicle restoration.

[Iain P]

It's been suggested that I keep my experiments with extreme close up photography of vintage lamps in the same thread so here goes!

I bought these off ebay recently, not knowing if they were lamps at all:



They are, of course, festoon lamps, and very lovely when cleaned with rubbing alcohol and polished up with Brasso. The brass capped ones work perfectly, the cap from one end of the other one fell off during cleaning and I'm trying to get it working again. Here's the 2 'survivors'



They are 12V 6W but glow nicely with just a 1.5v battery, but a 9 v battery is better. They run the batteries down very quickly though.
This was taken with the 1:1 macro lens plus 2X converter on Nikon D3100 camera. The only way to capture the glowing filament and the support in the same image is to take several bracketed images and combine in HDR software:

[Penman]

Hi
Nice, festoons seem to come with 2 different sizes of glass, thin ones where the glass is close to the cap size and fat ones which are, well, fatter.
Those look like the thinner ones.

I have found them in interior lights and also some number plate lights.
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Bristols should always come in pairs.

Any 2 from:-
Straight 6
V8 V10

[Iain P]

Interesting. I was surprised how solid and heavy they feel in the hand, for such small lamps. 3.5 grams each, my scales say.

[Rick]

Pop-up trafficators, or semaphore indicators, use festoon lamps too. Perhaps due to their movement, and the bump they receive when closing back within a car's coachwork, that's why they're quite solidly made.

Interesting images for sure, thanks for sharing them.

RJ
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[peter scott]

For any particular wattage low voltage filament lamps are much more durable than high voltage ones of the same wattage just because the filaments are much thicker in the low voltage ones.

Peter
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1939 SS Jaguar 2 1/2 litre saloon