Occasionally I'd see an old traffic light at a swap meet and always thought it would be cool to have one in the garage. Well, I finally got my first one a couple weeks ago. It's been fun learning a little about it. These came from the city of Cedar Rapids. I got them from an electrician who works on them. When the city replaces a light, they don't want the old ones back. I'm keeping one and gave the other to a friend. These are an Intelight ESB model made from 2003-2015. ESB stands for "Electronically Steerable Beam". There is an LED array for each light. The light passes through a diffuser. Depending on which LEDs are illuminated on the array, the light can be "steered" in different directions. This can be done remotely so technicians don't have to physically adjust the light while high up on a pole.

As you can imagine, these are much bigger up close then they normally look while driving. Each lens is 12" in diameter.




I removed the shades and the backplate to give them a good cleaning and coat of SEM Landau black. I used Mequiars PlastX polish on the clear plastic doors which cleaned them up pretty nicely. I ordered a controller and hooked it up last night. The controller has 38 pre-programed light functions you can choose from. You are also able to customize the amount of time each light is on. The next thing on the list is to clean up the aluminum mounting bracket assembly so I can get it mounted on the wall. Each bracket is held on with 3 stainless bolts. Being out in the weather for years and no use of anti seize, you can imagine what happened during removal. 4 of the 6 bolts snapped off. I couldn't use any heat due to the traffic light body being plastic. Hopefully some heat and luck will get the remainder of the bolts out. Due to limited space I'm going to mount it horizontally.


The other day I picked this up. It's an Eagle Durasig Pedestrian light. I haven't found out much about this one yet but I'm sure they normally come with 2 of these attached to each other. One for "walk" and one for "dont walk". This one came with extra lenses so I'm on the lookout for another so I can get both lights working as a pair. This one is bigger in person too. The lenses are 12" and the body is 14x14. This is an older one since it uses an incandescent bulb instead of LEDs.