Made by Johannesburg Metal Pressings, South Africa. – Later- Commercial And Domestic Appliance Corporation (Cadac) Johannesburg SA. I am not certain about the date here but the thinking is that these Apex branded lamps and lanterns were made after CADAC took over JMP in the early 1970s. This very rare lamp came to me via eBay and was missing the generator, spirit cup and control wheel. Fortunately the only other known example of this lamp belongs to Alan Ford in SA who was able to show me what the missing parts looked like and more importantly has the skills to reproduce them. It did seem that a Coleman R55 generator was very close in appearance and we were pretty sure the Apex was a 300 cp kero lamp so after some discussion we decided that adapting an R55 would probably work. I bought some R55s and sent three to Alan who then did the machining and welding to create a near exact copy of his Apex generator. He also made a tool to stamp out a spirit cup and made a resin copy of the control wheel. These parts arived in the mail this morning and after the normal fettling of filler cap seal and pump check valve washer I was able to try it. I fitted two Coleman #21A gold top mantles and it works well enough. However the generator does not stay hot enough and the burn started to yellow so I added 10% Wasbenzin to the kero and got a better burn. I suspect it wants rounder shaped mantles that sit closer to the generator. I am very pleased to have resurected only the second of these known in captivity which was only possible because of the generosity and efforts of Alan in SA so very many thanks Alan for making this possible I am truly grateful. ::Neil::
Hello Neil, that's an excellent find and congratulations go to Alan for some very skilful work. Has he joined this website yet? Jeff.
It was a seriously expensive find by the time I had paid postage from the US as well as the purchase price. Yes Alan has made it here after some initial difficulty over registation. He did an awesome job for me here and I was just so lucky that the guy who owns the only other example of this lamp was able to do the work and interested enough to actually spend the time on it. ::Neil::
It's good to hear that Alan has joined this forum. I shall look forward to seeing his posts, I'm sure that he will have picked up some interesting lamps, Jeff.
Good evening Ladies and Gentlemen Thank you for allowing me to join this esteemed congregation of parrafin oxidizers. It was with the greatest of pleasure that I was able to help Neil get his Apex table lantern operational. The biggest challenge was to get the flange nuts for the generator made on a CNC lathe, as they have a unique thread, 11 mm dia x31 TPI if I remember correctly. A silicone mould was taken off the red pricker knob. Luckily the orginal part was moulded in a slightly transparent material which I was very lucky to be able to match almost perfectly with common fibreglass resin and a drop of red pigment. The colour match and translucency was so good that I nearly shipped Neil the original part by mistake. The spirit cup required some simple press tooling made up from comvenient laser cut drop out circles scounged from the scrap dumpster at the engineering company. All in all it was an interesting exercise and great fun, and my contribution in a small way to thank Neil for all the help he has given me and all the other collectors around the world over the years. I also found and sent to him a somewhat rare Petromax table lamp some years back, which was the same as one I had been given and which was an unknown or undocumented model. I will post some pics of Apex stoves on the classic camp stoves site as well. rgds Alan
So that's where it came from? I must be getting old 'cos I knew it had come as incomplete and I remembered where I got the hood to complete it from but could not for the life of me remember who sent it. Being the complete polite Englishman I very probably said thanks at the time. I have since seen another which was found here in the UK. Model 816 if I remember right? ::Neil::
Yes, 816 is correct. So now there are 3 known examples, that is if you have found another there in UK?
