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Project 0719, Searchlight Cabinet
Gathering Materials-
After buying a searchlight off of a good friend I knew that I needed to get some sort of mast or stand to setup the signal. After getting old steel GRS cabinets I finally had something to put signals on. One cabinet some kids had broken the door handle off and messed with but that was the only cabinet with a small mast. The second cabinet the door had green paint on it and no mast. What I decided to do was to get the mast off the broken cabinet and set it on the better one. After moving to Union Pat told me a secret to getting it off. After getting the mast off I threw out the old cabinet and had to use a loader to raise up the mast and bolt it down. After that came raising the US&S housing into the air and bolt it to the side of the mast. After doing all that came the long part.
Plan-
The plan was to install a bank of batteries and have all the relays and transformers wired up.
Operation-
You have the 110Vac comming into a stepdown transformer that also runs to the battery charger. From the stepdown transformer the 10Vac goes to a rectified relay. Most relays operate at 10Vdc not 10Vac but some are special and come with a unit called a rectifier that changes AC into DC. The idea is that when the power is up it powers the 10Vac relay, when the relay is powered up it closes some contacts that connects the lamp with the transformer instead of the batteries. This is good to save battery power, it runs off the AC power till it has to run off the batteries. The signal mech and the rest of the relays will run off the batteries all the time, they use low power and the charger can keep them powered. This porject incountered many problems, someone tried to steal a SA Dwarf that was infont of the cabinet one saturday night. The problem was a power surge, about a mile down the road the lines had a phase to phase burnout. This caused a massive power surge, it ended up burning the line to the ground. After all the lights went out all you could see was the red searchlight that was running off the batteries. The main part to this problem was that the power surge burned up the clearview arresters. Thanks to safetran the only thing I had to replace was the arresters and no relays. After that I installed new arresters and more arresters on the batteries.
Final-
As of now the cabinet sits at the shop, the light used to be on 24hours until the boss wanted it off. The mech was removed and set inside the cabinet. Now it is charging the batteries all the time till it gets a new home!
Melissa is Wiring the main wires to the mech without the buddymate. The buddy mate will be added in a few days for easy change out of the signal if ever needed. These are hard to find today, most mechs do not come with them, unlike the GRS SA buddymate these are a option.
This is after the buddymate was installed and in operation. These help a bunch when in a jam and need to change out quick!
The internal mech, note the counterweights! Great signal!
Most units off the line had phankils for protection. A phankil is used for 2 main things, protection from vandials and such and to protect light from giving a false indication. I removed mine to get a better beam of light.
The signal upclose after I had removed the phankil.
These are the Safetran Clearview arresters that got the blunt of the power surge. Pretty black!
A close up of the units on the relay that is used to convert AC to DC.
The surge network I installed to protect the batteries and the items powered by the batteries.
This is of the transformer and the power transfer relays. The one relay on the left is the actual power transfer relay. The one on the right is a spare incase something happens to the main power transfer relay.
This is the backside of the cabinet that holds the battery charger, batteries, and the DT-10 timmer relay.
This is a front view of the signal. The cabinet holds the main components instead of having all the components located a different cabinet. My good Ole truck in the background!