DIYPhotography.net Photography and Studio Lighting

The following guest post was made by Rolf Randby, a fellow DIY-er, who has two right hands (this is yet another manifestation of Darwin's Evolution - The survivor of the guys who make stuff instead of buying them). The problem which Rolf was facing, is how to build a hot shoe mount for a flash trigger he made. Instead of running to the nearest photo store, he came up with a pretty cheap nice solution, that involves taking a part an old camera. This is also a good solution if your flash does not have a pc-sync outlet, as many of the commercial radio triggers use a phone jack to send the signal to the flash.

So to start this project of you will need an old camera that has a hot-shoe mount. Those are available at a lot of junk stores for a dollar or so. This camera is going to be disassembled - faint of heart - beware!

The other parts you are going to need are:

• 2mm phone plugs - used for the electrical connections
• 1/4" 20 nut - you know the drill - you've seen the lots of time on this site.
• Epoxy putty - this is kinda like Silly Putty, only once this baby gets hard, there is no going back - you can get this at your local hardware store.

The first step is to Cut the plastic surrounding the hot shoe to about 1 3/8" wide, 1 1/8" deep and 1/2" high. Be careful not to rip the wires going to the hot shoe! Cut to about 1" and strip. See the image below fr details

Carve a place for the female connector in one corner. Hot glue connector and nut in place. Solder wires, make sure center connector of hot shoe goes to the tip of phone plug. Use more hot glue to hold wires in place. The image below shows the jack, the nut and a bit of Epoxy putty (more of that soon)

Use epoxy putty to encase it all, trim before epoxy hardens! Paint black.

Total time about one hour. Total cost, less than $10.00.

See how the flash trigger connects to the flash via the mount in the next picture.

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