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Has anyone ever built their own studio strobes
Im lookin for plans or blueprints. any suggestions? Apr 08 06 07:30 pm Link Are you thinking of the strobe heads themselves or light modifiers? Apr 08 06 07:32 pm Link The heads/ model lights, etc. I like to tool around with the technology. maybe come up with some thing better! Apr 08 06 07:38 pm Link Yes, I have built three units. They user based on the Brown Line Speedatrons. The units I built were capible of 100-400 Watt/Sec of power and variable in between. In addition I built several Strobe heads ( 800 Watt/sec Soft box unit, and a 800 Watt/sec projection spot unit). The strobes are not very complicated if you understand basic electronics. However, I must warn you the internal operating voltages for many brands can vary from 500 - 1000 Volts with large caps that store a lot of power. If you get your wires crossed, BAD THINGS CAN HAPPEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Be very carefull. Apr 08 06 07:40 pm Link Odegard Photography wrote: When I read the title I also thought of the same thing. Apr 08 06 08:19 pm Link lll wrote: You see where the diagram says "main capacitor" thats a "network" of capacitors in a studio strobe, it can hold enough power to light-up the room or light-up you. Use caution and make sure you discharge the capacitor BEFORE touching. Apr 08 06 08:31 pm Link If you plan on continuing this project. I recommended that you plan carefully and understand what you are dealing with. You must plan for "Fail-Safe" conditions. This means that if the control system fails, it won't over-voltage your flash caps. Proper fusing to pervent blowing a fuse (or worse). As I was building my units my control system failed and the resulting explosion sounded like a firearm going off. Thankfully no one was hurt. It This was an expensive and dangours lession! After that I designed the systems so thare is no way to over-voltage the caps. Plus be carefull of wire size for carring loads. To small and you can have a fire in the unit, with lots of smoke and sparkes. Add most off all double check the connections to externial device like flash heads, PC sync cords and power connectors. I was most gratified once I had my units working and used in actual photo shoots. The variable power control was wonderful! My orginal units didn't have this. I have built severial photographic devices like light stands, barn doors, Soft boxes with strobe head, projection head, etc. If anyone would like to hear more, just let me know. Apr 08 06 09:24 pm Link Thanks for your concern! I currently work with much higher power sources, and am aware of pop and burn. We usually have rubber gloves and a large 2x4 on stand bye for those particular events. JK I hope that the blue prints are correct, know wad eye mean! Excellent knowledge yall have! send me more B Apr 09 06 07:56 pm Link OH yeah, caps are cool! we used to bang uhm with rocks when we was kids. hehehehe. B Apr 09 06 07:58 pm Link lll wrote: This circuit is pretty primitive and will fry any modern camera if used. In addition, there is no power control and you'd have no consistency in exposure or color. Why build your own when you can buy something cheap. You don't need to spend big bucks to get something with stable color, stable exposure, safe to operate with modern cameras, power control, power dumping, etc. Apr 10 06 12:18 am Link Visual E wrote: Visual, this is not really a circuit diagram. This is basically a nicely drawn block diagram, just for explaining parts. Everything has to be designed from here. Apr 10 06 12:29 am Link lll wrote: I have alien bees that i prowdly shoot with! I just wanna start messin around with the technology without rippen open my newer gear! I also have tons of hotlights that i work with. Apr 10 06 11:07 am Link I know a guy who gets great photos using high-power automotive work lights he bought from Pep Boys (auto supply store). The wattage matches the strobes output, but having the lights constantly on can make his studio a little hot. Apr 11 06 12:17 am Link Mark Young wrote: Sorry, Mark, not the same thing. The "wattage" is a continuous power drain, it has nothing to do with the amount of power coming out. Tungsten lamps are extremely inefficient, most of the energy goes to heat, not light. Strobes, on the other hand, does not work the same way and are much more efficient in energy use. 1000WS (Joules) is a lot brighter than a 1000W (continuous power) work lamp. You would need quite a few of these worklamp to match a 1000WS strobe. Apr 11 06 01:09 am Link Digital Soup wrote: Very good. Hotlights work very differently, though, much simpler. About 10 years ago I used to do some design work for Onkyo, that was fun. so I figure you guys could teach me something or at least tell me of a great book! I already mess around with light and its finite color capabilities! B, go to the link above and see the circuit diagram there. Honestly I don't know what level of electronics knowledge you have, but for designing things like this, the best place to learn it would be at a college. While the principle of a strobe is simple (see above), the control circuit isn't, and involves enough active devices to make it a challenge for degreed engineers. That said, this is certainly not the right place to ask this question. Apr 11 06 01:18 am Link Some food for thought. Under certain conditions a 'short' from a 1,200 joule pack can send an average size man 20ft across a studio - badly shaken/shocked. 5,000 joules will send him 30ft+ across a studio - stone dead. 30,000 joules has the potential (kinetic) to lift an empty school bus 1 inch off the ground for 1 second. Many years ago I used to use big (read huge) custom strobes (240Volt drawing 60Amp). The control housing was about the size of a small refrigerator and could accommodate up to six 5,000 joule modules, and dumping the capacitors completely before shutting down the units for the day was always a very precise and somewhat nerve racking exercise. Flip one switch out of sequence and the resulting bang would be deafening - and expensive! I made that mistake just the one time! Today's units are much more compact thanks to microcircuits, vastly superior and smaller capacitors, and safer thanks to improved safety features and fail-safes, however, X,000 joules unleashed is X,000 joules in any language. Be very careful! (on a sick side note. Why not hook up the wiring of any prison's electric chair to a studio strobe? Dump the capacitors and the execution will be certain, clean and over in a fraction of a second - with none of this 2,000 Volts at 8 Amps applied for circa 60 seconds, which is nothing but nasty and messy!) Apr 11 06 01:27 am Link Mark Young wrote: I have some really nice Quartz Halogens too. 2400 watts in 4 heads of 300/600. Apr 11 06 01:29 am Link back in the day..... using a unit called an ASCOR Sun... capacitor units were hooked together using 2 guage wire if I remember correctly and there was a small glass and wire reinforced window where you could actually see the tube glow blue.... and if a capacitor bank exploded which they did ... the whole building knew it. as the equipment got older it started to really make me nervous... that was what they used in detroit to light the cars in the studio.. and george kowamoto was the best... I googled the flash and came up with this... cant believe I used to play with these... on 9/30/01 12:01 PM, Jack Reznicki at [email protected] wrote: > Al, Do you remember Nye? When I first started assisting in the New York market in 1980 I was introduced to the Nye strobes. Both giant condenser versions and the occasional "compact power pack". After hearing about the condenser models and their ancestors, Ascor Sun Gun series and all the urban legend that went with these models, I was almost afraid to be in the same room with these! From day one it was instilled ASCOR SUN SERIES=DEATH! There was a whole check list you had to go through to turn them on and off and to switch power settings and to disconnect or add heads. When I was making $50. a day to assist in the beggining, I felt that I wasn't being paid enough to know the intricasies of these killer strobes. I just let the photographer or 1st assistant deal with them while pleading ignorance. To this day, I still wonder if the fried cat who tangled with a Sun Gun cable is still urban legend. Those of you in the market at that time, certainly have heard the story. The NYE strobes were supposed to be a little safer from what I remember. All the heavy hitter shooters doing still life loved using these. You just kept piggybacking 800w/s condensers until you had about a million watt seconds of power AND a short flash duration. I always wondered what kind of electric bills studios had to pay for using these miniature nuclear plants :-) Apr 11 06 01:55 am Link Darker-Side of-Midnight wrote: This is the funniest thing I have ever read! Apr 11 06 11:29 am Link lll wrote: You can actually get some great single light source shots with worklights. I am lucky because my wife's family owns a freight forwarding company and they have those 5 ft x 6ft pine boxes for shipping. I can put 2 - 1000 watt lights in there and tack an opaque white muslin to the front and it makes a beautiful softbox..... with that said, III is absolutely right that it gets hot as hell, you have to turn it off every 5 minutes so you don't start a fire..... and the biggest issue is that, like III mentioned, this is not like the burst of light released by the strobe, you tend to have a slower exposure time which can cause slight blurs from model movement or even shutter vibration. Fun to play with, but like many things, should be used to get a look you are wanting and not as your primary studio light source. Apr 11 06 11:43 am Link Thanks everyone for your input! I will repost when i have educated myself to da teeth! B Apr 13 06 01:19 pm Link Thanks everyone for your input! I will repost when i have educated myself to da teeth! B Apr 13 06 01:19 pm Link Basically you need a heavy duty Triac 40Amp 600v type to turn offf and on the main power to the following circuits.voltage tripler circuit (actually 2 of them) then a diode distribution to a bank of capacitors. You need a very large resistor 200 ohm 50watt type in this charging circuitry to limit the current on recharging. Next you need diodes that are a discharge circuit with a large 25 Watt type resistor to discharge the capacitors when the unit is switched off. Norman Powerpacks for thew Norman strobes have two voltage tripler circuits, one positive the other negative, fed by 120 volts outputting a horrendous 850 volt differential, (425 on each circuit) which is why everyone is telling you to be very careful as this stored in the 2000mfd capacitors will burn holes in you if not kill you if incorrectly handled. A 2000 mfd 450v capacitor in the positive circuit coupled with another in the negative circuit will produce approximately 400 w/s of power to a strobe head. Additionally you need a trigger circuit, small transformer increasing voltage to around 4kV. You need to utilize a triac circuit on the input to reduce the sync voltage to around 3v. I have done a lot of work on Norman powerpacks and have a pretty good understanding of how they work and how to repair them, so purchasing a blown up system is an alternative that with the cost of a few parts may be cheaper and better than trying to reinvent the wheel. Jun 12 11 09:39 pm Link Digital Soup wrote: Then think to the future - high power LEDs Jun 12 11 10:51 pm Link I would suggest that you avoid building anything from the ground up - it's not financially worthwhile It doesn't solve a problem - there are already good strobes on the market. Rather, I would suggest that you use the control mechanism which exists in a light with a defective design, fix the defects, and upgrade it. For example, you might take the control board which drives the IGBTs in a Alien Bee einstein light, and pair it with your own charging circuit, and your own capacitors. You could turn it into a very powerful pack and head system which recharges quickly, yet retains consistent colour. Doing this will avoid the need to spend your time milling the attachments for modifiers, hunting down sockets for flash tubes, and such. Building charging circuits is very straightforward indeed. You just need a voltage multiplier and an inductor to limit inrush current. Building your own charging circuit will allow you to build a system which isn't commercially feasible to manufacture. It would be fairly straightforward (although the capacitors would be expensive) to combine a modified profoto head with a alien bee einstein to obtain a system which recharges in 1/10 of a second, at 1000w/s. No such system exists, because most photographers don't have a power supply which can handle it. If you do, you could make something no-one else has. Jun 13 11 12:25 am Link Lohkee wrote: LEDs cannot, and never will rival flash tubes for photography. Jun 13 11 12:26 am Link Alan Sailer says he was an obscure photographer, working in his garage, shooting stuff with a pellet gun and capturing the results with a home-made microsecond flash. All it took was one picture to become a sudden hit on the social networks. http://boingboing.net/2011/05/26/moment.html Jun 13 11 12:31 am Link Darker-Side of-Midnight wrote: The reason the tubes would glow blue in those is that they wouldn't have used diodes, they would have used mercury arc rectifiers. Jun 13 11 12:36 am Link David-Thomas wrote: And people will never go to the moon Jun 13 11 12:41 am Link http://www.discovercircuits.com/XYZ/xenon.htm http://members.misty.com/don/donflash.html http://repairfaq.cis.upenn.edu/sam/strbfaq.htm http://talkingelectronics.com/projects/ … asher.html http://www.electronicsteacher.com/list- … ashers.php http://www.edaboard.com/thread206478.html http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/camera-flash1.htm http://www.epanorama.net/documents/lights/strobo.html http://circuitzoo.com/2010/04/18/electr … ing-lt3468 Jun 13 11 01:31 am Link I did many years ago, when I could not afford to buy any, but it's not something a would recommend if you are not very experienced working with electricity, since they are potentially very dangerous. Jun 13 11 01:45 am Link Crystal Perido wrote: LED's will always be less efficient than flash tubes unless someone invents a way to make LEDs emit more power than they consume. Jun 13 11 01:48 am Link David-Thomas wrote: No it wouldn't, it would be totally impossible. If you knew anything about electronics you would know why. I'll leave it to you to work it out. Jun 13 11 01:53 am Link David-Thomas wrote: I have several powerful LED flashlights. The are brighter and use less power than standard flashlights. The LED headlamps on cars are also very powerful. Jun 13 11 02:57 am Link WMcK wrote: Actually, it wouldn't be impossible at all. You would just connect the IGBT controller to a larger IGBT, add a high speed fan to the head, upgrade the wiring, use a very rugged capacitor bank, and use a 2x voltage multiplier. The voltage multiplier would be very simple, since you would be working with a high input voltage (415 volts). Jun 13 11 03:00 am Link Jerry Nemeth wrote: Not powerful enough, I'm afraid. To rival a flash tube, you would need tens of thousands of watts of continuous output power emitted by a small number of LEDs. (large banks would be unable to produce the hard light which flashtubes can produce). Jun 13 11 03:06 am Link David-Thomas wrote: You don't realize how powerful the latest LEDs are! I don't like the LED headlamps on cars because they are so bright Jun 13 11 03:11 am Link Jerry Nemeth wrote: Actually, I do. They aren't much more powerful, individually, than a 20 watt halogen light bulb. Jun 13 11 03:16 am Link David-Thomas wrote: You haven't seen the LEDs that I've seen. Jun 13 11 03:21 am Link Jun 13 11 03:46 am Link |
