The light is not the same, although pretty darn close. The CMP lights have just one cloth wire lead out of them, whereas the origional carrier lamp has the braided wiring which goes up to a socket on the lamp housing. The carrier lamp socket is a smaller diameter. I think you will find you have to enlarge the hole slightly to get a CMP lamp into it. And the early ones did use the rubber lamps, although with the scarcity of rubber later in the war, many rubber parts were changed over in production to either canvas,wood or metal, such as the rear step pads, the firing rests, the straps, and the lamp.
As you can see in the carrier part manual, the lamp body is a CMP part (with part numbers like C01Q... and C29Q....), and the socket, plug and cap are carrier specific numbers (C01UC....)
I'm going from memory about 10 years back. I still have the remains of an origional lamp somewhere in my collection of bits, but in the end, I think most of the guys use the metal lamp. I had the rubber lamp on my first carrier for a while, but within a year the NOS rubber disentegrated, and I went to the metal.
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