Yeah that's not too bad, I know people who drive an hour each way every day, but with no traffic either.
So today I had to refasten a couple Lithonia 4' vaportight fixtures that had started to fall out of the semi-rotted wood above them in the engine room on the boat. Boy was that a PITA. The disassembly was pretty easy both times though. I removed lamps (Sylvania /765 Octron!) from one with the power on and when I took out one lamp the remaining one dim-glowed JUST like a F40/RS fixture would until I took it out! The fixtures themselves have a bit of a story, despite being from 2011-2012-ish they had all their electrical guts replaced after being underwater for a week, by an electrician that actually grew up in my current house I'm typing this in! The "keeper" 1/4 turn thingies were long gone (Picture a standard run-of-the-mill-made-like-this-for-decades Lithonia striplight and channel cover, you know exactly what to picture) so he had used little square-drive sheet-metal screws instead, pretty clever! (He did this on most of them). Ballast turned out to be a typical run-of-the-mill-120/277v Advance(d failure rate) as far as I could tell in a dimly lit space, crouching in a place with no headroom though. Weird, never seen one light only one lamp like that before though. Now did I mention I was doing all this with the power on (other fixtures). So I rescrewed it with some 1-1/2" hex roofing screws. Then it was time to reattach the channel cover. The fixtures are so cheap the striplight body has bent a bit, making refastening the channel cover a PITA, it wouldn't fit over the sides of the channel properly. I ended up fudging it and shoving it up over on the "tab" side and screwing it on the other side. Then in went the lamps and it was back together.
Then time for the other one. This light is a single-lamp unit actually! This one was found by my dad for 10 bucks at a really good junk store in Seward, AK, in 2013, which has unfortunately since burned down. It originally had a 277v ballast, which I had to replace with a 120v unit. Back in July of 2013 I went to Spenard Builders' Supply in Sitka, AK and bought a 2-lamp (but wires up for one lamp like the magnetic ones) Advance(d failure rate) 120-277v unit. In it went. (In the dark with a flashlight, with no headroom, and banging into other pipes, etc...it was a fun job). Then I made the wonderful discovery that I had to buy new sockets since the originals were those stupid shunted ones. So rather than buy a new ballast I went to True Value (a couple weeks later I might add, this simple project took literally a month to complete in 2013) and bought some really nice, tall "tombstone" y-slot lampholders (I think Pass & Seymour or Leviton, don't remember). They're obviously intended for a striplight, and were even so nice they had screw terminals instead of push-ins. I ended up canibalizing them somehow (don't remember how anymore but it was removing and throwing away some little piece, totally fudging it). At least they fit the lampholder brackets of the striplight they were going in, albeit almost too far apart (lamp actually did fall out once). Of course, being one of those stupid replacement ballasts, the wires were all short and had to be spliced/unused ones capped off. When I took it apart again today, almost two years later, I was impressed at how nice my wiring job actually was...I thought I had done much worse.
When reinstalling the channel cover in 2013 after finally getting it wired up, I lost the little "keeper" thing. So I used a bunch of zip ties to hold the channel cover in place (between the hole and the slots in the sides of the strip for the lampholder brackets). Hack job but it worked for almost two years just fine. Lamp I bought at the same time as the ballast was a "Buyer's Choice" (Sylvania) F40CWX.
Anyhow, I took it apart again today. Trying to take the lamp out of the stupid Y-slot sockets with power on resulted in a nice high-pitched sizzling making me run for the light switch to turn it off! I got it shut off before any major damage happened, though the lamp pins and part of the socket have some arc marks. Got the lamp out but got to sniff the wonderful burnt-electrical smell for awhile.
Rescrewing it was tricky too, most of the original holes were used up so I had to "drill" my own using the screw gun and the screw.
Instead of zip-tying the channel cover I used some 1/2" hex roofing screws instead this time, inspired by the other fixtures. Lamp I used this time was a Sylvania Octron F32T8/741, since it was laying around and I've since heard T8s are fine on electronic T12 ballasts. But after sitting in storage for two years the lamp was really mercury starved at first: only a few inches at each end even lit up 4100K and not pink. Took a good 20 minutes to fully warm up. Sure a lot brighter than the F40CWX it replaced though, which I've since brought home with me. I'll post a pic of it later.
Later, at someone's house, I got to discussing lighting. I might be getting a Westy F40CW blackender and a Sylvania F40WW Lifeline from there! Also I'm getting a nice old wood cookstove from him, that's going in my kitchen this winter! Trading it for a diesel-burning one from my honorary grandfather's house that's been sitting in my garage for over a year now under a tarp, it's time it got a good home in exchange for a wood one! (That I'll actually install, too!).
I got some plumbing education in the process too. If you have coils or a water jacket in a stove for heating domestic water your plumbing must be fairly straight so no air bubbles can be trapped, otherwise you've literally got a pipe bomb LOL.