Home Made Portable softbox

Marac

Marac

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Marac Andrzej Kolodzinski
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I have made a hand held battery softbox from a load of junk really, My friend Mark Barker & I used the following items and have made a very portable twin light softbox for quite a low cost


1. One of those cheap 500,000 candle torches £6
2. 2x cheapo old jessops flash units car boot sale £5 the pair
3. Old laptop batteries, Free from recycle bin
4. Softbox (elinchrom 58x58 kit)quite expensive £60 (you can get cheaper ones or even make your own from sheets, I chose to use the elinchrom because I have a spare one.
5. If you want to be a snob (like me) I used wireless triggers £30 ebay

We firstly emptied all the crap out of the torch, lamp battery etc and shoved it all in the trash. We CAREFULLY opened up the lappy battery taking out the 'A' size units X4 to use as our main power source. Dry cell batts are better than the crap wet ones used in these cheapo torch units, and safer IMO. We wired them in series to give us the 6V needed to power the strobes. We then pulled the battery panel off the strobes and attached wires to the + & - terminals, these were connected to the battery via the trigger switch in the torch. We had to upgrade the charging unit supplied in the torch and we also added a charge meter and lamp, the unit takes about 8 hours to charge overnight using a 300ma adapter (we tried to use a 1A but the unit became a little hot, it charged a lot faster but .... safety first.

This unit is good for about 3000 flashes on a full charge and will recycle in under 1 sec. I will post some pics of the finished unit and even some pics taken using it if anyone is interested.

If you are a little bit good at soldering and have a knowledge of electronics I recommend you have a go and building one, we had lots of fun and learnt a lot too. If you have no idea about how electronics work then I would not advise pulling things apart as it can be dangerous, electric kills and those flash units can give you a very nasty BANG if you touch the wrong bit.

Thanks for reading





 
Munchkinn said:
Looks like a nice job. Are the flashes power adjustable?
Click to expand...

They were just cheapo jessops ones they had a switch on the front for some kind of power setting but we just put them both to NUKE POWER and glued the switches. If I ever wanted to power down then I have a few pieces of cloth to put inside the softbox itself or i can get some gradiant gells to go over the front of the flashes. It seems to work fine as it is and I can always move it further away from the subject.

Might be an idea for the mk2 model ;)

:bonk:
 
An interesting project Marac.

Any chance of more details?
Like on the two flashguns, were they old ‘film’ era ones and if so what is the voltage across the pins, or a model number would help find the answer.

It would also be helpful to know what you are using to trigger the unit? like radio? PC lead? Etc.

Any further information would be much appreciated.

I would also be interested if anyone else is thinking of building a similar unit.
Sam-D
 
Hi Sam, thanks for the interest

Yes, they were old film ones but I would say at the modern end of the film era as they are quite compact. I have put a socket 1/4" jack socket so they might be triggered by a cable or a wireless unit. I have used the wireless Elinchrom Skyport units they work very well.

I have no idea of the exact voltage across the pins or model number as they are now buried in hard foam (my bad)

I will get around to putting a pic up with the softbox attached and also a shot taken with it.

I would also be interested in any other projects like this one
 
In all it's glory with a very dodgy looking geazer holding it

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I'm incredibly impressed! Loving the idea of home made studio Flash lighting....


this should really be posted on www.diyphotography.net if its not already :)
 
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