Home of The Elvis Trooper, Obi1kenny

 

Graflex Conversion, Nuts and Bolts


Here is a quick tutorial on how the attach the 7 Allen head bolts to your Graflex flash tube, using the custom washers and parts from my conversion kit. A new full tutorial will be up as soon as I can get it going but till now I hope this and the old tutorial will help. For drilling the bolt hole pattern please see the old tutorial here:

Graflex Conversion Tutorial 

  Here is your end result with this parts kit it should only take about 5 minutes at the most to screw the bolts into place once you modify the washers. The modification is show bellow which itself should only take a matter of minutes depending on what type of cutting tools you have..

 


So from the kit we have these parts listed here:

* 7 Allen head bolts, custom machined internal washers and nuts

 

In 4 out of the 7 holes this method works perfect as you see bellow. The contoured washers sits perfectly inside the tube and actually lends support to the frame so you can tighten down the bolts and nuts as tight as you want without and odd bending of the tube. And is also fast and easy to put together. 

 

Now the onto the other 3 out of the 7 bolts that are a bit harder to put in and these are the ones you see on top of the Graflex closest to the center band. At this point you will need to modify a few of the parts in the kit yourself. And there are many tools that will do this, and pedestal grinder, and disk sabers, a dermal tool, or even a hacksaw and a vise. all you will be doing is cutting or grinding the washers so that they will fit snug next to each other and give clearance for assembly.

Bellow is one example of how these aluminum washers can be ground to fit inside the tube with plenty of clearance room on each side.

Now this will work great for the 2 outside bolts and nuts as they will fit in very nicely, but the middle bolt is still a problem as there is not enough room for the center nut.

Now you can always glue or epoxy the bolts into the tube or to the washers. But I have added one extra part that will make this even easier to deal with if you still want to bolt these in make it easy on yourself.  

Bellow in the center you will see the last part added to this bolt kit and it is a shorter and slimmer washer that is similar to the others but made out of steel and is tapped in the center so that no nut is required to secure this center bolt. From this picture you can also se all of the modifications you will need to make. The top row shows that the center bolt will need to be ground down a little for clearance. The second row shows the parts in the unmodified condition. And the bottom row shows the parts after modification.

You can now see that this final part has solved the internal clearance problems that have arisen with this build, and with just a small bit of effort.

 

Here is an example of how to modify your washers as above, but still depending on what type of building tools you might have. This picture shows the steel washer being modified by hand with the use of a pedestal grinder. 

WARNING: Be very cautious and wear your safety glasses!


 

And your final result from the inside view of your Graflex flash tube.