BEN GOT IT RIGHT !! 3D print modification to the MENARDS LIFT BRIDGE

Alan.....I have no idea where that would go.....but I'm just a boy from the bush!!!

Peter.....Buco Australia.

Lifte bridge?

Ben GOT IT!!!

@BenLMaggi posted:

Life bridge?

Darnit! I was gonna say that.

Dave

Very ingenoius Alan! Nice job, .

Yay for me. Though "Life bridge" meant "Lift Bridge" (I changed my posting to not sound so stupid).

Very cool project

Just pointing this out for the historical significance,  I am not a perfectionist my by any means or I would not have a BigBoy running on my FEC right of way.  The red obstruction lamps in today's world seem to all fire in unison, as they are not incandescent lamps anymore, the flashers are usually xenon flash tubes.  I noticed in the massive wind farm fields along I65 in Indiana, when they were first up and running, as far as you could see, every single red ob lamp came on and went off at the exact same time, it was a bit spooky.  My last trip up that way, about 3 1/2 years ago when my son moved from Waukegan back home here, they had broken the windmills into fields, and the lamps would come on, all in unison, but only in select areas, with groups of windmill ob lamps flashing in a random pattern,  more along the lines of how the old lamps worked.  I had wondered if it gave a pilot flying at night some kind of vertigo to see a hundred square miles or more of red lamps all coming on at once.  I included a pic of a common beacon lamp used years ago, 1000 Watts and says burn 'Base Up', there was a matching one that said base down as there were 2 lamps in each beacon assembly for redundancy, one down and one up.   The circuit to flash these lamps was nothing more than a motor and cam rocking a mercury switch.  When the lamp was off, power was sent to a resistor bank to maintain a current flow such that the facility the tower was associated with did not have a 20 amp per fixture pulsating load.   Now, the xenon systems look like the inside of a desktop computer, all circuit boards, a lot of complicated stuff to flash a bulb 30 times a second.  I have thrown this exact type bulb from the top of a 500 ft tower into an uncut grass field, and they didn't break.

@CALNNC posted:

…. I had wondered if it gave a pilot flying at night some kind of vertigo to see a hundred square miles or more of red lamps all coming on at once...

As a retired pilot, I can tell you that while it did not induce vertigo, the first time I saw something like this from the air was…well…very strange.

From a distance my first reaction was, “What the heck is that?” As we got closer and things became clearer, we realized what it was. Then we marveled at the sight of acres and acres of flashing lights, all flashing in unison.

As I said, a strange sight.