No worries Stelmer. I should have PM'd you last night, but when I got in my Orange Livebox stubbornly refused to work! I'm hopeful my contact will have a GR150 bowl next time I see him. He's always hinting that he's close to getting one!
In the meantime, we have 5 years to stock up on MBF lamps as they're being banned in 2015.Oh heck, that will ruin my avatar and force a bulk-replacement of Clacton's GEC Z5640s and Z5670s (a few hundred of the mercury-running variants are still going, with some approaching 60 years old!). With any luck, they'll invent a SON retrofit for the 80w mercury bulb (as far as I know, they only do them from 125w to 400w at the moment).
I have a GEC-Z9455 with internal gear. It has a huge ballast with 4 terminals on it. I originally thought it was an internal-ignitor ballast. Is there any chance of it being a leak transformer?That would be fantastic if it was, but I have no idea and you'll have to ask the experts on here! When sotonsteve mentioned that you need the leak transformer gear and not the ignitor gear to power it up, the first thing I did was to check my 90w SOX lanterns to see if any didn't have an ignitor, but I had no luck there. My contact recently took down a GEC Z9465 from Clacton (same as yours, internal gear but side entry, installed in the mid-1980s, and puzzlingly no G.E.C. logo impression in the top) and he would like to sell it to me. My decision to buy might hinge on whether I could use the gear for SLI sometime in the future and mount more modern gear in the Z9465 instead!
I might need a Leak Transformer to go with it.Funnily enough I'm in the same position and will need some help with this. Phosco has kindly offered to keep an eye out for me, and in the East Anglian discussion thread, mazeteam and sotonsteve say there can still be found in old column bases or in the scrap bins of local depots.