Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Bell & Howell Aerial combat 16mm film titler fixture

This fixture was used to put a title onto gun camera footage either before or after a mission.  It'll be interesting to find out from any vets what the procedure was.

The unit is bakelite, which is delicate material to have survived.  I also have a sextant which has a large amount of bakelite (including the case, go figure for the sextant) and magnesium parts.








All of the fellows I know and can ask were with seaplanes or bombers, so don't have the same procedures.  Might have been used by them, however.

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Bausch & Lomb Deuterium Source power supply

I got the rest of the deuterium source in an auction today.  Now have a functioning source.

This is the head, already covered in an earlier entry


 Supply front.  It has an on off switch and an ammeter to indicate primary high voltage draw.  Deuterium lamps must be started with a heater and a spark, so the trick of these supplies is to kick that w/o damaging the lamp.  The yellow light comes on for about 5 or so seconds to fire the lamp, and the arc stabilizes in about 5 more to the usual "uv" violet glow.
 rear of the display 120v 60hz, 160 watts cat number 33-86-35

 from the top of the source housing
 bottom of the housing type also 33-66-35
 output aperture from supply (operating, but flash and exposure doesn't show uv)
 uv purple, available light shot.

 collimation lens system.  since it is UV, must be quartz optics




Next stop, collect the monochromator from stash and test out the thing.  Unfortunately, I don't know how far down my Ocean Optics spectrograph goes.