Maxlume 3X8w bulkhead

Another eBay find, this time a seemingly unknown offering from Maxlume. This triple 8w bulkhead was described as used, however all over there's tell tale signs that in fact its NOS. Its undrilled, and the impressively thick acrylic cover shown no signs of heat scorching. The starters are metal can Philips S2's, and without a shadow of a doubt are original to the bulkhead. Inside, there's 3 ballasts instead of the more usual 2 ballast setup, meaning this would be one seriously reliable fitting in service. The wires are rubber insulated, and are still in totally perfect condition, again telling me the fittings had no use.

Applying power for the first time surprised me, as the tubes I'd picked out are of a very high resistance cathode construction, so normally take ages to start, Despite that, this fitting instantly struck the tubes with no action needed from any of the starters. In fact as I type this, I've put 3 totally EOL tubes with broken cathodes in, and it fired them up like it was nothing, so this thing is looking like it'll be evil to lamps when they EOL. The ballasts have a very nice hum to them too, you can hear them but they aren't in the slightest bit loud, so a very nice fitting overall. thats when I realised the ballasts are actually 115v, so they must have been incredibly well built to take 240v up the chuff like that. They're now removed from the fitting, being replaced with some 240v equivalents.

I plan to install this, and maybe the Eleco alongside all the other 8w bulkheads I have in my shed, for that I'll have to move the twin 4w and twin 6w fitting, a simple task due to the way I've wired the shed.