norman varioheads

[olleorama]

I finally took the plunge and bought two norman 200B kits instead of my homemade powerpack flashes and I got two norman variohead. I can't find any info on them on the net. Anybody wanna enlighten me about these?

[Mike Wilde]

I have the Norman 200B. Mine came to me about 9months ago with a dead ni-cad cell, and a charger that was suited to charging ni-cads only.
I bought a 12V gel cell to suit the form factor that the nicad pack once occupied. The wiring harness needed to be slightly modified to short out the thermostat, since gelled lead acid are usually not charged on temperture, like ni-cads are. I bought an uatomotive battery maintaner type chahrger, and it does a wonderful job keeping this battery topped up.

The head is the standard bare bulb, with a smallish detachable reflector. As fate would have it, I also had a speed ring insert to to suit it as part of an otherwise idle bunch of stuff bought at an auction a year ago. So with a bit of work I now have a head to fire into a softbox that works very nicely for head shots, etc.

I presume the vario head was some sort of arrangement where the flash tube could be moved forward or back relative to the position of the reflector. This would thus vary the flood/spill angle of the light.

The other vario option could have been to vary the charging voltage of the capacitor bank to vary light output.
My early production 200B uses diodes switched by a three position power switch to set the dump to be 1 capacitor for 50w/s output, 2 for 100, and all 4 for 200w/s.

Another modification I have made to my pack, is to solder added leads into the multi-pin head to pack connector, to bring the 12V battery leads outside of the pack. I have made up a larger Ah battery pack that can also be hung on a light stand, when I know that I have a long intensive shoot planned. It plugs into these new leads on the head plug, to yield faster recycle times after a lot of shots at 200w/s.


I hope this helps you.

[olleorama]

I'll be receiving them this week so I can fill you in on the vario heads later. I also plan to use SLA's instead of the Nicads, I've read that there are some that fit well in the case, as you say. I also read that the circuit in the 200B is rated somewhere around 30 amps (!), so the slightly higher amperage of the SLAs won't matter.

[olleorama]

The seller gave me the wrong information. It's vari-strobe heads from GVI. That became quantum. David Goldfarb wrote a thread on these a while ago.