i made a page on this light a while back
https://www.lighting-gallery.net/index.php?topic=7252.0
the thing was working great until today when it made a loud pop and the inner 2 lamps shut off. and then brown liquid started running out of it. i opened it up and put rubber gloves on to clean it up and remove it from the ceiling and the ballasts were both very hot, the blew up one melted my glove. i took it off the ceiling and now am going to rehang one of my 60s rapid start fixtures back up. what was the stuff that pored out?

That brown stuff may have been PCBs which are very toxic. Dispose of the ballast properly.

yeah. i am going to remove the old ballasts, (both of them because the other one was just as hot.

if anybody is interested in purchasing the fixture, i will sell if for cheap if you could either pay shipping or come get it. if not i will probably just throw it out

You don't have to throw the fixture. Just give it a REALLY good scrub (try avoiding ballast wires though) and re-paint it and it's good to go.

yeah, i will probably try to clean it up, but i will sell it. because it is of no use to me because it does not have the preheat ballast anymore. i don't want to use rapid start or electronic.

Good morning. I worked in transformer test and repair for a major electric utility when I was younger. We placed our hands in pole transformers marked "PCB Inhibited", we got inside the large substation 169kv transformers after pulling the core and cleaned out the sludge in the bottom of the huge tanks. We had cuts on our hands and the oil got on our clothing and we wore it home. Not one of the people I worked with got cancer, not one. Twenty years after that exposure, I ran 5 miles on an incline track every other day and worked out as well and this is all after breathing the PCB oil fumes. I know people who were never exposed and they died in their 50-60's from heart attacks and strokes.  
There are more toxins in the food we eat from pesticides and herbicides than we could ever guess.
Just an observation.

Ok, got it! My use of the word "very" wasn't good there.

Sounds like the capacitor in the ballast blew up. You can remove the ballasts and wash the fixture with Dawn dish soap to remove the oil. Then install new ballasts.
There are new old stock Universal 203 preheat ballasts on ebay that have non-PCB capacitors. Here is a link.

Also, Universal 203 and Universal 205 (or 205-TC-P) are both two lamp F40 preheat ballasts, if you are looking for them. The 205 wires up slightly differently because it has an internal starting compensator, but the wiring diagram on them shows how to wire them.

yeah, both the ballasts had actually come apart when i unscrewed them from the fixture, the one that blew had a big hold blown in the capacitor, and the one that did not had the capacitor very swollen up, so it was ready to go soon too. as for the fixture, i will hold on to it for the time being. i have some 50s louvered 40 watt x4 fixtures that i am going to install. at some point i will either buy new ballasts and keep it, or install LED tubes and sell it. but fot the time being i am going to put it in the shed. i put too much time into it to just trash it.

I've been having pretty good luck replacing capacitors in ballasts. Once you know where they are located it's not hard to dig them out. I've got a bunch of early 70's Bonus line ballasts that I need to get at one of these days, many have shorted capacitors.

the capacitor popped becausethe ballast was partially shorted and was overheating.i am going to put new ones in and sell it.

reason It pops is due cap age and lossing uF and cap heat up being swollen.   the cap have job regulating
current into the lamp to keep it constant current
once cap fails and become shorted it looses current regulation in the ballast making it run extreamly hot
caps should be replace on old ballast.  Esp if fuxture
sat around unuse for extended time of non use the cap
becomes deformed and will heat up and pop.
it getting to point where all older preheat ballast cap
need replacing  just ensure we keep our fluorescent
running longer.  I would recomend extending the cap lead  and remote mount the cap.