Hi Gang,

I don't have a question, but would like to share with you something I recently discovered with my Graflite flash handle. I shoot a Speed Graphic and recently bought a 2 cell Graflite flash gun and I was intrigued by the idea of using it with the remote cable and fire the shutter with the solenoid. I have not been able to find the proper remote cable so I thought of making one. But before I started I though of trying a typical house extension cord between the cord from the solenoid to the flash handle and using the flash itself as the remote. I have a second handle, which I have connected to a small electronic flash and found that the Graflite flash can fire the electronic flash through the solenoid. I haven’t tested this with film yet, but all my dry run tests work great. If you want to try this, use and old extension cord where the prongs are both the same shape and one is not flared, like out new ones. I am even going to get a new extension cord and file down the wider of the two prongs and use it only with my Graflite (since the 2 D batteries only produce 3v it is not very dangerous) and see how far I can be from my camera and fire the shutter.

I like to shoot wild life and I have been wanting to try this with my Speed and I found the 12 foot shutter release cable I have is not long enough to hide from the wild life. But now with this method I can use extension cords and get far enough from the animals and maybe get some neat shots on large format.

I don’t know if this is already common knowledge to the long time Graflex people but I have used my Speed for 1 year and a half, and only recently bought a Graflite flash and nowhere have I heard of this idea. I did a short search through the archives and didn’t find threads that mentioned this idea. Any comments or cautions would be greatly appreciated.

Take care,
Zparras

Frankly, Zparras, I thought this was alredy rather obvious. The "proper remote cable" you speak of from Graflex was only 15 ft. long, HH to HH, so there is an advantage to making your own if you want to go longer. Be sure to maintain correct polarity to prevent misfires.

You can obtain a cord with the push button release on one end from Paramount. But, unless you have them make a long cord to go with it, you'll have to either make, or hopefully find one of the old flash extension cords which had male HH on one end, and female HH on the other. Mine were made by Honeywell.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: alecj on 2005-04-10 14:31 ]</font>