Thorn Beta 6

Here's a shot of my Thorn Beta 6 after I cleaned it up. It was quite nasty inside, with a ton of what appeared to be nesting material from a bird. In addition the original ballast was burnt out and rusted in place and the gear tray rusted too.

Anyway for the housing, I dumped out the nesting material. Then I tackled the rusted in place ballast. The original ballast was a Canadian General Electric F-Can style ballast which was mounted to the housing with two through bolts through the top. Those were hopelessly rusted in place so I opted to cut the bolts in two and not bother with trying to remove them. Most of the other screws weren't as rusted and came out easily except for one of the screws holding the cable strap in. I had to break out the torch and PB Blaster for that.

After I got the everything out, I went to work washing the housing, I used a combination of a SOS pad and Bar Keeper's Friend which usually works pretty well for cleaning cast aluminum.

The gear tray had some rust on it so I ended up wire wheeling the loose paint and rust off and gave it a couple of coats of white paint.

Finally the plastic lens I gave it a good rinse and then washed off most of the surface dirt with dish soap. After cleaning there was some haze on it so I gave it a good buffing by hand with Novus products, which usually work well for shining up plastic. There's still some yellowing especially on the other side but I did get some of it off.

Once the housing was cleaned up, I figured out a ballast solution. I decided to use a Fullham WH-5 ballast which works fairly decently for SOX lamps and it was a similar form factor as the original F-Can ballast. I usually prefer getting the correct ballast but at $250-300 CAD for one that was way too much money for me to spend. Plus I would need to build a gear tray to hold it using the existing mounting holes. The Fullham ballast was a bit shorter than the original CGE F-can ballast so I used a strip of galvanized steel to make a ada