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I also want to point out, that those photos were taken in a completely dark room (only those cabs for light) and my phone did some brightness adjustments automatically. I might recommend going with frosted if you can find them or the 4000K color versions.
 
The amazon ones worked great. They were EXTREMELY bright. So I guess the GE ones I had were either bad, or really do require some kind of current regulation.

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For reference to anyone that comes along in the future, these are the ones I got from Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01C4N4876/
Sorry to bring this one back from the dead, but I'm wondering how those bulbs have held up for the past ~8 months? I'm going to be doing a full restore on a Blast City and replacing the lamp is on my list. Does it plug right in and work? Any modifications? Bypass ballast with a fuse?

Also, thanks so much for sharing a specific item. I've been trying to piece together what I need from various forum posts but there's just so much crap returned in the Amazon search results.
 
Sorry to bring this one back from the dead, but I'm wondering how those bulbs have held up for the past ~8 months? I'm going to be doing a full restore on a Blast City and replacing the lamp is on my list. Does it plug right in and work? Any modifications? Bypass ballast with a fuse?
You shouldn't need anything but the LED bulb. So no modifications needed. The FG-1E starter is only needed if you are using a fluorescent tube.
 
They still work fine, still extremely bright, I bypassed my ballast with no starter or fuse or anything.
 
Thanks all! I went with a 24" bulb from Home Depot from the same Mfr (didn't want to buy 4). Really appreciate all the feedback and knowledge sharing :)
 
I ended up getting a TOGGLED LED T8 bulb. Can't get it to work, but not sure if I've done the wiring correctly and thats my issue. The toggled says it requires a non-shunted lampholder which appears to be what we have in the blast but not positive.

Here's a pic of my wiring.
 

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The FG-1E starter is only needed if you are using a fluorescent tube.
Yes and no. If you're not bypassing the holder, you need something in there otherwise your other AC line is cut, like this:

https://forum.arcadeotaku.com/viewtopic.php?p=464419#p464419


Here's a pic of my wiring.
Did you cut the orange capped wire from the ballast?

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If you did, that's your problem. The ballast is basically a resistor wired in series. To bypass it you need to connect the two wires going to the ballast together.
 
Here's a pic of my wiring.
Did you cut the orange capped wire from the ballast?

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If you did, that's your problem. The ballast is basically a resistor wired in series. To bypass it you need to connect the two wires going to the ballast together.
The wire nut is joining the black and white wires that were connected to the ballast.

I think I found out part of the problem. The bulb I got is a T8, but it's designed to only receive power from one side of the bulb. The Hyperkion that was linked and known to work is powered by both ends.
 
So I ended up just getting a 24" T8 LED replacement from Home Depot's website with free shipping that turned out great. https://www.homedepot.com/p/toggled...near-Tube-LED-Light-Bulb-E208-50310/205622687
It's a little bit of a tight fit, but nothing difficult and I didn't feel like I was straining the fixture inserting it.

It only expects AC power from one side, so the other side basically just has dummy prongs that meant to hold it in place in the fixture. I decided to have the left side of the fixture have power so I cut the two wires going into the ballast, soldered them together, and put heat shrink tubing on them. For the other wire I cut the wire going into the starter fixture and the wire going behind it that connects the 2 ends together, then connected them. Basically AC power is using 2 wires coming into the fixture, so you just want to follow the power input wires then cut and split them in a way that they're only connected to 1 end of the light fixture. I'm kinda under the impression that this is how the majority of LED replacements for florescents are handled. I tried to leave just enough wire left from the ballast and starter that it could be converted back to florescent if I die and some crazy LED hating person wants to 'restore' the cab :P

Here's some pictures of the work and result: https://imgur.com/a/ON5BNKn
1.) The wires coming out of the ballast aren't connected to anything and are just tucked under the ballast to get them out of the way.
2.) Both pictures of the marquee off and on were taken with the same room lighting, but the camera just kept auto-adjusting and making the room appear to be dimly lit.
3.) I think it looks great and that the picture doesn't fully convey it. I've never seen an original Blast City florescent marquee in use to compare against, but this is nicely illuminated. It doesn't look dim but it also doesn't look overly bright like if too powerful of a replacement was used. The specs say the brightness is 1120 lumens and the light appearance is 5000K (daylight), so maybe that's a good combination when the tube is frosted.
 
Howdy. Sorry to dig up this old thread but I was looking into getting a much brighter bulb in my blast city as well. the one in mine is definitely not stock and looks like it's 5v.
I recently dropped a 120v led bar in my MVS and looks snappy as hell. I've seen that most cabs run 120v to their marquee lights and planned on just throwing the same one in this Blast City but this 5v deal has me wondering now. Should I go ahead and try to throw another one of these in as well? Or try looking for another 5v led bar.

Also looks like the previous owner split the connection so I can plug the old line back in and use fluorescent.
So if anyone has a good fluorescent LED bulb to recommend I'd honestly much rather take that route...
Attached is the old led bulb I took out of my Blast. It provides practically no light at all and needs to go.
Thanks!
 

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It's not 5 volts, it's 5 watts. The LED bar runs on AC.

Fortunately, it looks like whoever hacked in the LED bar in seems to have saved all the important bits so you can still use regular fluorescent tubes. Consider yourself lucky! Usually the original lighting fixtures are just removed and thrown in the trash when you get the cabs from China! I FUCKING HATE IT.

For best results, remove the ugly spliced in connector, plug in the 3-pin AMP up connector (which you may or may not need to recrimp), bypass the ballast and starter, and throw in a nice LED tube.
 
It's not 5 volts, it's 5 watts. The LED bar runs on AC.

Fortunately, it looks like whoever hacked in the LED bar in seems to have saved all the important bits so you can still use regular fluorescent tubes. Consider yourself lucky! Usually the original lighting fixtures are just removed and thrown in the trash when you get the cabs from China! I FUCKING HATE IT.

For best results, remove the ugly spliced in connector, plug in the 3-pin AMP up connector (which you may or may not need to recrimp), bypass the ballast and starter, and throw in a nice LED tube.
I don't know how I didn't notice that was a w and not a v... jfc.
but killer! i've now got a nice toggled led tube coming in and will give that all a shot. tysm nem!
 
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