Vintage Lighting Mid-century Century Followspot

Scenemaster60

Well-Known Member
I was a visiting a friend of mine over the weekend who collects vintage Mid-Century Modern EVERYTHING. He has dozens of television sets, early microwave ovens, vintage radios and even several vintage tele-type machines!

Among his collection, he ws proud to show one of his acquisitions which is a vintage followspot. It turned out to be a Century #1542. It is a radial followspot that uses a 3000 watt T32 mogul bi-post lamp. The Photometrics handbook lists it having an 8.5 degree beam spread and a 12 degree field.

The wiring on it looked perfectly safe and I was game to fire it up, but time was limited and he didn't have a 30 amp 120 volt stage-pin outlet handy! Next time I visit him I'll bring along a 30 amp female stage pin to 50 amp welder plug adapter (wired correctly, of course to get 120 volts only) and we'll give it a test!

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Just look at that old monster! I'd love to see a few more better photos of it (moving it out of there may be annoying?). They certainly don't make lamps like that 3000w T32 mogul bi-post these days. The "green" people would HATE that lamp.

That boomerang is HUGE! I wonder how unwieldy it is.... I'd clean the dust off a little before firing it up too, thats a lot of dust to burn.
 
I just picked one of these up tonight (was buying a completely different tool from a guy on CL, and it happens that he had one in his garage). Difference- it has a 5000 watt bulb instead of 3000. Wired for 230/240, but I don't think it runs full 240 through the bulb, as the bulb is a 115/120 v bulb. I believe by the looks of it, the other hot leg runs the cooling fans inside.
 
Did the math on the unit I picked up. Would necessitate a 50 amp breaker with the 5000 watt bulb mine came with. Nerding out and found 10,000 lumen LED's that run at 33 volts DC, which I can run off three 12v deep cycle batteries in series breaking to parallel at the LED's. 8 of these 4cm x4cm led's will produce slightly more lumens than the original bulb, and run at a fraction of the current draw- not to mention the lesser heat. Will still need some cooling fans, but those will be 12v units for cooling processors in tower pc's. Will post pics of the finished project soon. LED's for this are only about 5 bucks each.
 
There is more to this than lumens. For the optics to work efficiently, the size and placement of the light source needs to be pretty close to that of the lamp filament. I don't think you can achieve that with LED. I could be wrong, but I suspect you won't get the light output you expect. After all, if it were easy, we'd see low cost LED retrofits for ellipsoidals.
 

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