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Just a note - you have a picture holding one - I know halogen lamps can overheat and shatter due to skin oil on the shell - not sure about the older high wattage plain tungsten ones.

Yes, not sure about tungsten ones - but you'd be cleaning them gently before using anyway - the halogen ones are still sealed and always had lots of warnings in the boxes about fingerprints

The fingerprint disaster was way overblown...no pun intended. The fault was supposed to be that the fingerprint would change the glass expansion rate at the fingerprint point at power-up and cause the catastrophe. If you thought you had a fingerprint on it, just rub it off. I changed hundreds of lamps in the 70's and no one was impaled. The usual failure was a semi-molten bubble in the glass at a weak spot or a spot that the tungsten line-vibrated to close to that finally gave way.

I was also always taught to "dim the lights up" gradually, because the tv studio was up on top of a hill and was always freezing and the rapid heat up might cause a bulb to blow, none ever did. But it was a weird sound all the studio lights heating up and the metal going "tink tink tink tink" all around you. Not that any studios who used these really ever ran the bulbs at full capacity anyway after the CCD cameras came in

But back on topic, it would be good to find these a useful home - everyone keeps telling me to chuck them out, but i cant bear to.

According to what I've read, it was recommended to run at 70% brightness, because you then had both a plus and minus margin to adjust lighting without too much of a color temp difference - plus, of course, life would be greatly extended.

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