Introduction

I decided to start this blog to show the process I am going through to replicate some hard to find lenses for vintage emergency vehicles.  After being around the professional car (ambulances, hearses, limos) community for a while, and owning an ambulance myself for a while, I noticed that some of them had special lights on them, sometimes repurposed from something else, and occasionally purpose-built for a specific vehicle.  Due to the age of these vehicles and the type of light used, parts became increasingly scarce as the vehicles became more and more obsolete. One example of this is the Ful-Vu light, made specifically for Miller-Meteor ambulances over a period of 5 years or so, from the late 60's to the early 70's:

Ful-Vu light with polished base.

 

Typical Ful-Vu 4 corner installation on Miller-Meteor Cadillac Ambulance.

 

 

Another example of a hard to find lens is the S & M Lamp Co. Oval Light:

 

 

 

This light started out being used in the 30's as fog and driving lamps in yellow or clear.  It may have been used back then in red on emergency vehicles or as a stop lamp, but I don't recall seeing any that far back.  It is actually a metal bucket with a bulb in it, with a clear or colored glass lens over top of it.  For whatever reason, they showed up on certain emergency vehicles primarily in the late 50's and early 60's.  There is also some debate as to whether or not they were used on Superior school busses in the 60's.  Some say they were, others say the busses only used an oval plastic lens, which looks similar, but is a completely different size and mounts differently.  Whatever the case, the busses didn't use oval shaped lights for very long, so you can pretty much forget about finding replacement lenses in junkyards today.

 

(By the way, if you think the lens is rare, try finding a replacement TRIM RING today!  Oh boy!  A competent metal-brasher can hammer out a decent replica bucket, given enough of a good one to go off of, and we are discussing how to replace the lens here, but fabricating the fragile trim ring that holds the two together, and getting it into the proper oval shape, then getting it CHROMED takes a true artist!  I would suggest you snatch up any you find for less than $100, as someone somewhere will have been looking for a very long time!)

 

 

The reason these lenses are rare is because they were made of glass.  Glass is expensive to produce in limited quantities, and as the fixtures became more and more obsolete, production of replacement parts stopped.  What you are left with is whatever parts were produced during the run.  Of course, glass also breaks if not handled or cared for properly, so a certain amount of the remaining stock dies of attrition.  As these old vehicles are resurrected, it is this kind of part that keeps you from finishing your restoration.  Now, there probably will never be a big enough market to get anyone to invest in reproducing these lenses in glass as they were originally, but it is not too far-fetched to make a reasonable facsimile, IF you can come up with an original to start the process.  Otherwise you would be forced to have someone re-prototype the original, at considerable cost.

 

I am lucky enough to have secured a couple of originals to start the process:

 

 

Ful-Vu lens (left) and S&M Oval Light (right)

 

 

Of course, I did some tests with other, non-critical glass lenses (more $$$) to make sure the process wouldn't damage the precious originals.