Curious, huh? We're going to talk about a simple mod to the very popular Speedotron 22" beauty dish that will decrease its native softboxiness and enhance its beauty dishiness.
One criticism of the Speedotron dish is that its standard central diffusion disk allows so much light to pass that the dish behaves more like a softbox than like a classic beauty dish. To address this undesirable characteristic, some have had custom opaque plastic disks fabricated, covered the diffusion material (which, by the way, is Rosco Tough Frost) with aluminum foil, or, in the case of Elinchrom users, removed the central deflector entirely, replacing it with a solid Elinchrom deflector. Here's another approach.
First, let's address the nasty paper fasteners. I don't know why, but they've always bothered me. Speedotron uses three common brass paper fasteners to attach the central deflector/diffusion disk to the beauty dish. It's an effective solution but, if you're planning to swap deflectors on occasion, they're a bit of a pain. So, for starters, let's get rid of the fasteners.
To do this, all we need are three 3/8" long #8 machine screws, three #8 knurled brass nuts, and a few dollops of a suitable adhesive (I used J-B Kwik which is the quick-setting version of J-B Weld).
Remove the paper fasteners and central diffusion disk. To make things easy and avoid excessive aggravation, also remove the underlying metal ring that sits on the three spacer posts. On the under side of the ring spread a small amount of J-B Kwik around the holes where the paper fasteners were and then insert the three #8 screws from the under side being VERY careful not to get any of the J-B Kwik in the screw threads.
Once the J-B Kwik has set (which will only take about 5 minutes), reattach the ring to the spacer posts. This is what you now have:
Now the standard diffusion disk can be secured in place using the knurled nuts:
And the dish returned to operational status:
Okay, so we've gotten rid of the paper fasteners but haven't accomplished our mission of making the Speedotron act more like a BD than like softbox. Here's how we do that.
What makes this particular mod work is that the diameter disk required to alter the performance characteristics of the dish is just a hair under 8":
Now where can we find pre-cut 8" disks suitable for this application? Time's up. The answer is food service suppliers. It turns out that something called a "pizza separator" is the perfect solution. Pizza separators, which are nothing more than aluminum disks, are available in a range of diamters including 8". For this experiment, I ordered solid, perforated, and super-perforated 8" pizza separators from www.instawares.com
. They're cheap at something like $2.89 or so each. Here's what the brown truck brought me:
If you look very closely at the edge of the super-perforated disk (lower right), you'll notice three small notches. These had to be filed to allow the disk to fit within the three retaining screws on the Speedotron dish. Here's a better look:
So, armed with these three disks, we can now get six different looks out of the Speedotron dish: 1-Standard Rosco Tough Frost diffuser, 2-Solid deflector, 3-Perforated deflector, 4-Perforated deflector with Tough Frost overlay, 5-Super-perforated deflector, 6-Super-perforated deflector with Tough Frost overlay.
Here's the dish with the solid 8" aluminum pizza separator in place:
This configuration, as you'd expect, gives the most beauty dish like light. Here are all of the available configurations viewed from the front:
I'd call this mod simple, cheap, and effective. If you have a Speedotron dish, get yourself some pizza separators.
Dave F.
