Topic: For pavement light lovers, deck lights!

[glassobsessed]

For anyone with a passion for pavement lights here are some photos of a couple of deck lights.  

These were removed from a wooden boat during some restoration work by my brother in law. The boat was originally built in 1947 (served as a 'Scottish Islands ferry') but I believe these lights were installed in the 1970s and are likely to have originally come from another boat. The lights are set into bronze housings (bronze withstands salt water corrosion better than most metals) and one housing is stamped 1083 but there are no other marks that I have noticed.

The glass has a slight lilac tinge which is much more pronounced in the photos than it is to the eye. The lights measure 25cm by 7cm, the triangular bit is about 5.5cm deep. With housings, they weigh over 3kg each.

Enjoy.  

John

[Frank]

The colour is almost certainly a result of manganese used in the metal to give the glass clarity  :spls:. see here http://www.glassmessages.com/index.php/topic,515.0.html

Be nice if these could be traced to a Scottish maker but more likely Birmingham where there was a maker of such things... got their catalogue somewhere.

If you email the pics, I will put it into my 'do something about this one day' folder  still got 4,000 description to change and 4,000 images to add to SG and lots more for other sites... not to mention building half a house and finding a source of income  :24:

[glassobsessed]

Cheers, will email you the photos later this evening Frank, if you have too much time on your hands I would suggest the odd crossword.

John

[ian.macky]

Hi John-- nice deck prisms!  That style is used to this day-- I think Davey & Co makes them still, and perhaps others.  Sometimes they have acrylic lenses 

Here's a pic I just took (and placed in the Public Domain at Wikicommons) of my deck prism collection.  I have one of that rectangular type, too, as well as some yet rarer ones.  They're all rare now.



Cheers...

--ian

[Patrick]

Wow................  love them all , but especially the small violet one at the bottom.

Regards, Patrick

[pamela]

LOVELY! Thanks for sharing these  :kissy:

 :mrgreen:

[glassobsessed]

So that's not a lemon squeezer in the centre then? 

John

[ian.macky]

Wow................  love them all , but especially the small violet one at the bottom.

Patrick, it is a loverly dark purple and would surely be purty as hell sticking out the ceiling belowdecks, but it's such a dark color that hardly any light passes so it's fairly useless as illumination.  Mood lighting it would be.  Feelin' purple...

Someone got the shakes adding manganese to the batch I suppose.  You see that sort of heavy purple color often in Canadian insulators.  Either they wanted to make purple glass on purpose or just tried to decolorize and got it wrong...

[ian.macky]

So that's not a lemon squeezer in the centre then?

That's the Mother of All Reamer-Style Deck Prisms.  Supposedly recovered from the bottom of the Baltic, it's 7 3/4" in diameter and weights 10 1/4#.  Got heavy-handed with the selenium decolorizer it looks like.  I need a smaller (normal!) reamer for the collection.  They still make that pattern today.  These guys have the best selection of patterns, including bulls-eye, reamer and rectangular prism.