This summer I had to reballast a Lithiona single-lamp 4' vaportight light on my boat. This would probably be my worst relamping/reballasting story so far so enjoy a good laugh! Apparently the light was found for 10 bucks at a thrift store in Seward, AK. When I got there, it didn't work. I was told another electrician friend (Who used to live in my house oddly enough!) had said it was the wrong ballast. Later, when I got around to trying to fix it, I discovered, as I had somehow anticipated, that there was a 277v F32T8 ballast in there that was wired to 120v (And of course didn't work!) So I went out and bought a 2-lamp Advance electronic rapid start F40/F34 ballast, (Couldn't find a T8 ballast and it had identical wiring to a magnetic rapid start ballast so it could run one lamp fine, and a "Buyer's Choice" (Sylvania) F40CWX for it. I got back there and started to replace the ballast only to discover the fixture had those internally-shunted instant-start tombstones (Which I personally hate!). So a few weeks after that I went to True Value, couldn't find regular donut-slot tombstone sockets, so ended up buying a pair of (I think Hubbell but I don't remember) Y-slot tombstones that were really nice; they had screw terminals, and were really long...I think they were the type you'd use in a strip fixture. I ended up canibalizing them a bit by removing the screws they'd atttach to the fixture with, and jammed them in there. Since the ballast had short leads (Agh!) I had to splice everything with wirenuts too. Then I lost the little wingnut-like thingy that holds the ballast cover up (The inside of this light was basically a strip fixture inside a vaportight enclosure). So, in my infinite wisdom I made one out of zip-ties between the hole and the slots the lampholder brackets fit in (There was still enough space for a few small zip-ties) and got the cover back on. Stuck the lamp in, put the vaportight lens back on, and it worked! Overall I must admit it was a rather crappy job though.