This came through the post yesterday, my most recent Ebay purchase and quite reasonably priced. This I suspect has spent its life on the railway having had various parts changed to keep it running although not a hard life judging by the condition. The hood has been swapped from an AL8 to accommodate a standard Tilley globe and burner rather than the mica shade and twin inlet burner this would have originally had. It's had a pre-heater added and I haven't checked to see if it's just the change in hood or a longer vapouriser, but there is a little bracket that's been made to raise the reflector up to the correct height. I'm not sure what the "AFBX" is that has been scratched into the paint above the label. I know these lamps sometimes have the station where they were used stamped on them or something similar but i'm not sure if that's what this is. Shame this one didn't come on it's track stand.
It's a possibility, I also thought possibly the Roman numeral for 10 but I think they would have just put 10. Google AFBX railway doesn't bring up a lot, all I found was a reference to AFBX louvred vans and if you search AFB railway the you just finds some German automatic train operator, or Air Force Base.
The instructions on the side give two methods of pre-heating. The first is the old fashioned method using meths and the torch as normal, the other suggests removing the wicks from the torch and filling the cups with 'owlite'. Has anyone seen this version in any instructions before? It's the first time I've seen it.
New one on me, too, although I do have a small sachet of Owlite and those instructions seem the obvious way to use it. I presume that Owlite was one of Tilley's 'brilliant ideas' that soon proved impractical and was quickly discontinued...
When you see some of these lamps with the meths jar attached to the handle, meths seems like the best option where as if you where to fill the jar with owlite, not only would you have to dig it out using the torch, you'd also have to wangle it around to put the torch back in the jar when you've lit the lamp. Only upside is that it wouldn't be quite so bad if you knocked the jar over.
Ray, it's a preheating powder Tilley had back then. I guess it was meant to be easier to handle than meths, but I doubt it was. As you can read on the Owlite package [url=http://0flo.com/index.php?threads/344 you were supposed to remove the asbestos wick and fill the preheating clip with this powder, then go along as usual in the procedure. Neil also posted a larger tin with this stuff, seen [url=http://0flo.com/index.php?threads/347
