[AndiiT]

Hi,
I too have a number of "vintage" Christmas lights in my collection. Like a lot of vintage equipment some have been obtained form car boot sales and others from the likes of eBay. In a similar fashion to Steve P, Christmas lights are also partly resposible for my love of vintage elctrical stuff!!

Recently I have obtained a couple of non - working "lilliput bulb" sets which are identical to some that we owned when I was a youngster. Whilst not wishing to upset the purists too much, due to a number of factors, I have considered either converting them to LED, or in the case of the set which has detachable shades, just purchasing a cheapo set form the £1 shop and finding a method of securing the shades to them.

As a child, I recall one of my friends parents having a set of Bubble lights, these were a sort of candle shaped affair, with the glass tubes that represented the candles flame filed with a (coloured?) liquid that bubbled as the heat from the lamps increased as they warmed up.
There were only eight 30Volt bulbs in these lights so they ran rather hot.

One of the most interesting sets that I recall as a child was the set of "Sputnik" lights in on of our major towns (Redcar) butchers window, these lights flashed in what seemed like a controlled sequence, but they may have just been two seperately intertwined series sets with a flasher bulb in each string, I do remember that there was definetely four plaited wires in the string so they must have been manufactured like that.


When I get round to it I'l post some pictures of my sets, it might be closer to Christmas though!!

Regards
Andrew