Flash no longer working... why?

I have a Norman 808 flash system. I trigger it with a Wein L8 micro slave, which in turn is triggered by an on-camera flash. The 808 has a telephone jack synch connector and the L8 has a two-prong plug, so I connect the two with a home-made adapter.

 

The flash recently stopped working in the middle of a shoot. I didn't touch it; I just took a short break, and when I returned, no flash.

 

I found that I could still trigger the flash with the test button, and also by shorting the two-prong contacts on my home made adapter. The on camera flash was clearly working. That left only one component that could be at fault: the L8 micro slave. I ordered a new one.

 

The new L8 arrived today. I fired everything up -- and still no flash.

 

What is wrong here? The only logical conclusion I see is that my L8 just spontaneously failed after about ten years of use, and the replacement I ordered is defective. That's too farfetched to be plausible, but I don't know what else to think.

I would step through the installation again and focus on the home made adapter. Make another one or completely disassemble it. Or find a way to use a radio or hard-wired (sync cord) trigger system.

Before anything else, try reversing the new Wein in the receptacle; it's pretty typical for these things (and flashes) to only work when polarity is a certain way.

Agreed. All modern electronic triggers assume a negative "earth" polarity. Reverse them and they simply don't work. Old flash units with a trigger voltage above 400 are also problematic.

 

Personally I'd convert to radio triggers. They're more reliable than optical triggering, although "peanut" slaves have the advantage of needing no batteries.

 

BTW, by "telephone jack" do you mean a 1/4" audio jack plug? They're not strictly the same. A telephone jack has a smaller diameter and differently-shaped tip than the common 1/4" audio jack.

 

If you use radio triggers you can connect them to the flash with a 3.5mm to 1/4" jack adapter or cable, which can't be accidentally reversed.

See if a direct connection from camera to your power unit will work with a wire cable from PC or camera shoe to the RCA plug. If not, then the audio jack plug is not working. Sometimes connectors fail just because of oxidation. I have got some to work again by a gentle swab of contact cleaner. I still use radio shack but you may need to look for a substitute. The hook up of the Wein household ( I think that is what you have) plug to the other should be no problem. But you need assurance that the flash unit synch jack is OK. thus the direct wire cable try. Let us know what happens. Normans are decent units and take a lot of kicking around. Company still in business under another umbrella should you need service. You may also look to the "home made adapter' for continuity check...if you have a meter. Good luck, sir.

The solution to my mystery turned out to be surprising. The story is rather long.

 

I took the power pack, trigger, and one head to a repair place that I've relied on for over 20 years. After the technician examined the power pack he called me and told me that it was in perfect shape except that flash head connector #3 wasn't working (which I knew, and didn't mind), but the synch voltage (5 volts) was too low to overcome the trigger's internal resistance. He said I could solve the problem by getting a proper radio controlled trigger. He said that when I picked up my equipment he'd show me several inexpensive Chinese triggers that he considered good enough to rely on.

 

When I went back, the technician attached a transmitter to one of my cameras and its receiver to the power pack, and the flash did just what it did with my "broken" trigger: nothing. Again, it flashed obediently when he pressed the test button or shorted the sync connector.

 

I deal with complex technology in my own job, so I waited patiently while he struggled to correct a hugely embarrassing situation that I've been in myself. After a half hour or so he accepted my suggestion that he work on the problem some more and call me when he figured it out.

 

He called a few days later. The mystery was no longer was why the flash wasn't working correctly, he told me; it was why the flash had ever worked at all. The slide switches that control the individual flash head connectors all were worn out. Three of the four connectors had no copper connecting them to the trigger circuit; they were apparently being triggered by induction, made possible by a rat's nest of wires jammed into the power pack in a space that was barely large enough to hold them. Because of the way the power pack was designed, it would have cost about $300 to repair -- much more than it is worth. I'm going to sell my broken power pack for parts, and the flash heads as working used units.

 

So now I need a new flash system. I've decided to get a couple of monolights instead of another power pack and heads; they're more flexible and easier to move around (it's easier both to move them around, and to move around them).

 

When I bought my old system over 20 years ago, monolights would have have cost me a fortune. Now I can get Chinese ones for less than $100 each. My repair person's opinion was, "They work just as well as professional units, but when one of them breaks, you throw it away and spend $100 to replace it instead of $200 to repair it."

 

I'm probably going to buy Neewer lights. They seem to get the most positive reviews on sites like Amazon, and unlike certain competitors, they come with a warranty that's long enough to cover more than DOA. I'll get either two 300 watt-second units, or one 300 for bounce fill and one 180 as a main light. (I'll use them mostly for small product photography with a digital camera.) In the past I've rarely used more than two lights, but I can always buy more if I want decide I need them.