Flashing fairy lights

[charles]

[meow2222]

lights just twinkle slightly.

NT

[damduck-egg]

That takes me back to a Christmas a long time ago, Got a plastic kit of a VC10. Cannot remember what make it was now. Some of the nav lights had primitive plastic light guides that terminated by one of those flashing bulbs. Like all most electrical toys in the 60's it depended on plain old batteries and ate them rapidly. Thinking back some of the things I had would probably work well now with modern batteries and led lights. A big disappointment was an amphibious car which looked a bit like a range rover but couldn't have been because it predated them. Bloody thing only ran about 30 mins on a set of batteries and couldn't pull itself up a ramp out of the water.

G.Harman

[Tim Watts]

[Andrew Gabriel]

The 20V 3W MES sets are older, and I remember my parents having them, and I got the set and remaining bulbs to play with when they were decommissioned.

The original bulbs had a half-spherical base, and a conical tip with rounded point, e.g.

in their day, you could also buy compatible special shaped painted bulbs, e.g. a father Christmas, and other things.

[Graham.]

There was definatly another sort of flashing xmas light that only flashed itself by shorting its filliment with the bimetal strip. I had a chain with two or three of these in it. The rest of the chain would brighten slightly of course, and this rather enhanced the effect. Something I used to do with all mains energised chains whether flashing or not, is to put a series diode in the plug to dim them. They looked better like this, and lasted much longer.

[Richard Russell]

As Andrew said, they came in several different shapes (we had one set with them all shaped like bells) but the approximately conical ones were the most common as I recollect.

Richard.

[Frank Erskine]

Yes - I did mean MES :-)

[Chris J Dixon]

I have some of the more expensive LED sets, which are extendible (up to a point), and simply plug in. I certainly hope to get a good few years from them.

This sort of thing

I managed to get them cheaper at B&Q, on a pensioners' day last year.

Chris

[mrsgonz]

Hi just bought a set of 300 LED lights, that when you switch them on they d on't remember the setting you left them on!!! Yep the 10 second rule worked on this set. We just count through the setting we wanted and left our fin ger on it for a good 10 seconds on the the one we wanted , it work a treat, cheers !!!!!

[mrsgonz]

Hi we ve just purchased a set of multi function LED fairy lights for the ga rden. We have them on a timer so want them to remember the last setting. As a previous post the only way we can get them to stay on the setting we wa nt and not start from the beginning is to count though from the start and w hen you reach the setting you want, do not release your finger, keep it pus hed down for a good , 10 seconds , it works a treat, thank you