1000w SON gear board
This is a brand new old stock 1000w SON ballast I ordered in specially for the Soldi & Scatti - Solcam DSC1000 lantern, and once arrived I quickly got to making a new gear board for it. The first thing that struck me about the ballast is just how bloody heavy it is, the screws in the wooden backboard in the display column certainly bend when this boards hung off them, so for obvious reasons this won't be hung off the door of the lanterns shed cause I think it'd pull the door off the hinges...

Off Dez's advice I wired in 100uf of capacitors, obviously I didn't have anything remotely close to that rating in a singular piece, so I made a bracket to take 4 25uf capacitors, all wired in series. 1000w Igniters have to be as close to the lamp as possible, hence why there's no igniter fitted here, which is good really else the whole board would have been hanging out the column door.

1000w SON gear board

This is a brand new old stock 1000w SON ballast I ordered in specially for the Soldi & Scatti - Solcam DSC1000 lantern, and once arrived I quickly got to making a new gear board for it. The first thing that struck me about the ballast is just how bloody heavy it is, the screws in the wooden backboard in the display column certainly bend when this boards hung off them, so for obvious reasons this won't be hung off the door of the lanterns shed cause I think it'd pull the door off the hinges...

Off Dez's advice I wired in 100uf of capacitors, obviously I didn't have anything remotely close to that rating in a singular piece, so I made a bracket to take 4 25uf capacitors, all wired in series. 1000w Igniters have to be as close to the lamp as possible, hence why there's no igniter fitted here, which is good really else the whole board would have been hanging out the column door.

IMG_3801.jpeg 20260511_215214.jpg DSC02561.JPG DSC02567.JPG DSC02574.JPG
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Date added:10 May, 2026
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Beta 5   [10 May, 2026 at 08:20 PM]
Nice layout, looks pretty compact for 1000W.
AngryHorse   [11 May, 2026 at 08:03 AM]
I hear ya with the weight Surprised, there’s a lot of laminates in these! They’re quiet ballast’s though.
FrontSideBus   [11 May, 2026 at 09:32 AM]
These are always impressive chunky ballasts! Don't you mean wired in parallel, not series? I had 4 x 50 uf caps wired up in parallel for my CSI PAR64 box and the cables going into them get a bit warm in operation!
Dave   [16 May, 2026 at 07:58 PM]
the silence struck me more than anything else, it was shockingly quiet considering how high powered it really is.

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