For a light
house effect, I have mounted in two different retail situations some
ETC S-4, 10degree
HMI Lekos on commercial turn tables. The turn table
spinner is similar to a
mirror ball motor but with a top that spins at your desired RPMs and has a
power feed
thru to use in powering up lights with. The 150w/4,200°K lekos were chosen for their long life and
intensity - just brighter than that of a 575w S-4
Leko, but not dimmable. The standard turn table was also only rated for about 3 amps thus a
HMI fixture was ideal.
That after trying various Beam Projectors, Ray Lights, Aircraft Landing Lights, and
PAR 64 Very Narrow Spots for their
effect on a modified
base that would take a higher amperage. The S-4
Leko did the best job of projecting a similar beam to that of a light
house outside and at night with
throw distances further than 50'. Major problem to overcome was that the
yoke on such fixtures is far off center and not only did the
fixture without modification
throw off the balance but it’s orbit was much larger than it needed to be. In making the
fixture I had to create some very labor intensive offset
yoke brackets to mount the
yoke to and re-center the
instrument. Since than I found out that
ETC offers some offset brackets for the
yoke that I plan to buy next time instead of making a bracket, though at least for the second
fixture I took some photos of my brackets so I could more easily figure out how it did it. (I get paid to custom make weird stuff. Just Friday I was custom building a
PAR 64 with handles and heat sinks so that Peter Gabriel in his
current tour can pick the
fixture up and use it for a big flash light during one of his numbers.)
Were it a shorter
throw and in a theater setting, I would mount a 8"
fresnel, inside your sculpture, separate the
power feed from the motor
power in a
spinner so I could put both on separate control channels of a
dimmer and let it fly. If I couldn't get the
spinner to put out 8.1/3 amps worth of
power, I would probably take the 8"
lens and
reflector and install a smaller lamp on the
spinner with out
fixture housing given it was masked by sculpture. (The
Fresnel lens was originally developed for light houses.) The
spinner is a budget thing, your’s was a great idea. Your phonograph idea is interesting, How about writing up a more detailed report on what you did? Can you take a picture to post? Must have been something.
I have done a lot of wired things over the years but probably the one that stands out as most wired was a end of show
effect where the exasperated actor at the end as the lights are coming down, goes to the refrigerator to see what’s in it. I decided to install a
strobe light inside the refrigerator to
strobe him as a final
effect. Of course my theater had no budget or
strobe fixtures. Ever drill a hole in a refrigerator and mount a
fixture inside it that was independent of the door operated
switch, than re-wired the light that comes with the
unit to fit a 400w lamp for the non-strobe scene lighting? It was strange, almost un-natural to do both things to a poor working refrigerator.
I took a
page out of the Gelette,
Stage Lighting
book that was the most modern
book on lighting when I was in college and made my own
strobe fixture. This
book had mentioned about the fact that if you install a properly sized
fluorescent lamp starter in
line with the
incandescent bulb, it will when fitted up with the proper lamp create a very random
strobe effect. The
fluorescent lamp starter basically is a electricity collector in that it collects up the
voltage and sends it out in bursts of high amperage in an effort to jump the arc gap and start a
fluorescent lamp. Unfortunately, with an
incandescent lamp, that poor
fluorescent starter will never be able to
strike that arc of light and will just keep continuing to collect up the energy and
send it out in bursts until it burns out - and it takes a long time to burn out. Thus the
incandescent bulb will constantly flicker.
I mounted the starter inside the
reflector of a exterior work light that was set up with a 100w 2.1/2"
RSC lamp. This way the
fixture was weather and humidity safe, and had a relatively short
filament length. (The shorter the
filament length, the shorter amount of time it will take to go from 0% to full.) For my
fixture, I just happened to have the
reflector and lamp
base left over from a very bad concept by Kliegl (an ancient lighting company) on the 400w 2.1/2"
RSC based 6"
Fresnel that had since been retrofitted to a normal type of lamp and
base. They had this idea way back when in like the 1960s that the
RSC - double ended work light type lamp would revolutionize the lighting industry, and put them in Fresnels and 3.1/2" Lekos. Too bad the
filament length was so long in length that it made the optics way in-effective. Anyway, I mounted the shorter lamp
base, starter and
reflector inside the
fixture and installed it in the fridge. What a cool
effect.
Here is my notes on the effects of different starters on different lamps: (Note, to do this
effect, you had better have someone around who absolutely knows electricity and have a copy of the
book. This is only my experiments on the effects of different starters as they relate to differing lamps which was not published with the text.)
Flicker
Effect:
Flourescent starters in
line with “
Edison” style medium
base lamps for a random flicker.
Note:
effect works on R,
Rsc, G, P, PS, A, and other lamps but not well on
Par lamps. The larger the
filament, the slower it is to go on.
Starters: FS2 (9v.15&20w.), FS4 (30&40w), FS12 (32w.), FS25 (22w.)
<table
border=1><tr align="center"><td>Starter:</td><td>7.5W.</td><td>15W.</td><td>25W.</td><td>40W.</td><td>50W.</td><td>60W.</td><td>75W.</td><td>90W.</td><td>100W.</td><td>120W.</td><td>150W.</td></tr><tr align="center"><td>FS2</td><td>No</td><td>No</td><td>No</td><td>No</td><td>No</td><td>No</td><td>No</td><td>No</td><td>No</td><td>No</td><td>No
Effect.</td></tr><tr align="center"><td>FB2*</td><td>X-Fast</td><td>X-Fast</td><td>X-Fast</td><td>Yes</td><td>Yes</td><td>Yes</td><td>Yes</td><td>Yes</td><td>Yes</td><td>ON/ON</td><td>ON/ON</td></tr><tr align="center"><td>FS4</td><td>No</td><td>No</td><td>No</td><td>No</td><td>No</td><td>No</td><td>No</td><td>No</td><td>No</td><td>No</td><td>No</td></tr><tr align="center"><td>FS5</td><td>ON/ON</td><td>ON/ON</td><td>ON/ON</td><td>ON/ON</td><td>ON/ON</td><td>Yes</td><td>X-Fast</td><td>Yes</td><td>Yes</td><td>Yes(Slow)</td><td>ON/ON</td></tr><tr align="center"><td>FS12</td><td>No</td><td>No</td><td>No</td><td>No</td><td>No</td><td>No</td><td>No</td><td>No</td><td>No</td><td>No</td><td>No</td></tr><tr align="center"><td>FS25</td><td>X-Fast</td><td>X-Fast</td><td>Yes</td><td>Yes</td><td>Yes(Slow)</td><td>Yes</td><td>Yes(Slow)</td><td>Yes</td><td>No</td><td>Yes(Slow)</td><td>ON/ON</td></tr></table>
Yes = flicker
effect without warm up time.
No = Does not work
Yes(Slow) = longer warm up time to work, and slower flicker speed
X-Fast = Flickers at a rapid rate.
ON/ON = Always on, does not work.
(Hate it when forums conserve space by re-writing my tables or
spacing. To understand this, you might have to copy and install it on a word processing program, or match up Yes and No's with where they would match to a lamp wattage.)
*Edited to make the tables work by dvsDave at 11pm 6-3-02