Paul C. Buff, Inc. Technical Forum

Santa was very very good to me: I received three Einstein's, Cybersyncs and modifiers on Dec 24. ;) I've been pretty busy since then unpacking and testing five boxes of gear. Extremely happy camper so far. Couple of things though ...

I right away noticed that when I try to mount my 640's on my stands, the fit is so tight to the 5/8" spigot, I had to twist the light back and forth while applying pressure to gently force it into place. This happened with all three lights and with all of my available stands. Two stands I tested on were Promasters and one is a Westcott, so these aren't funky eBay junk or something.

I get the impression that the drilled hole in the stand mounts just needs to be reamed out a couple thou. Maybe if I wrapped some fine grit emery paper around a dowel I could enlarge them just enough.

I'm wondering if anyone else has encountered this and what did you do?

Hmmmm. I can only say that I have not run into this with any of the Impact, Interfit, Calumet, or Manfrotto lightstands I own. Of the four, the Manfrottos are definitely the rugged fat-boys, and the e640's slip over their studs with ease. I also have quite a few spare flat sided studs of varying make, and no problems there either.

What brands are yours? I'm really curious.

Craíg
http://www.craigwasselphotoart.com

Well that's certainly a representative sample!



ProMaster (4) and Westcott (1). The five of them are heavy duty enough for the e640 (I also have 4 light duty ones I haven't tested yet). All of them fit a large collection of umbrella mounts and other doodads I have.

Thanks, Craig.

I have some heavy black (Powder coated?) steel Matthews C-stands and found their paint used on the spigot and their clamps made things too tight. I had to strip it off and sand them down a bit before things would slip on, which was a pain to do too.

I did write to them about the paint issue and got zero response as I wasn't too keen on sanding new stands down so things would fit. Wouldn't even fit their own accessories and clamps either. The old chrome ones do fit, but the thick black paint made it impossible as it was on their clamps too.

I also thought about the adjustable 5/8" reamer part but they get expensive! Maybe a small flap sander or rotary file that would fit into a Dremel would be quicker?

Mack

Wow - with Matthew's good reputation for quality equipment I am surprised you did not get any response. The powder coating/paint you note is interesting and a very good point. With the tight tolerances on quality gear, I can see where that would be all it would take to change a spigot from an exact fit to just a little too big. All of mine are just bare metal.

Craíg
http://www.craigwasselphotoart.com

Ah, yes! I have a Dremel and a small sanding drum for it. As it feels like the tightness is mainly right at the hole's opening I don't expect I need to remove much metal to fix this.

First step will be to remove the mount from the e640, of course.

Thanks for that suggestion, Mack.

Change of tactic:

After testing a few more stands, I found that a few were fine as-is. I grabbed my dial caliper and measured the PCB hole inner diameter. I found that to be precisely 0.625" (ie 5/8" on the nose) whereas the stand spigots OD's range from 0.615 to 0.630. Obviously some won't accept the Einstein at all.

I vigorously applied some fine grit steel wool to the slightly oversize Promaster stand spigots and was able to reduce them to fit with a couple of minutes work to each. One made-in-China Westcott stand was made of tougher stuff and has resisted even a whole bunch of sanding and steel wool, so I'll just mark it Do Not Use With PCB and leave it, I think.

I measured an average cheapo umbrella mount spigot ID at 0.635", btw, explaining why they never cause trouble on any stand.

Anyway, case closed.