Does anyone know where to find a battery replacement for one of the old Graflex Strobomatic 500 prtable flash setups? Or a substitute, or information on successfully converting it to AC operation (since I seem to always be where electricity is available, and don't really need the battery).
They stopped making those things about 40 years ago. This means that all of the high voltage components, including the capacitors, are at least that old, which raises some safety issues.
Some Graflex 500 strobes used a non-rechargeable high voltage (450V?) dry battery, a type of battery that hasn't been made in many years. Some of them had a low voltage (rechargeable) ni-cad battery pack and a primitive (by modern standards) converter and built-in battery charger. If you wanted to run either unit directly off AC, you removed the battery box and attached a dedicated AC power pack in its place. The AC power pack contained circuitry to convert the power from a 110VAC wall outlet to around 450VDC to charge the capacitors to fire the flash.
In any case, it would likely be cheaper to buy a newer strobe than to try to get an old Strob 500 back into service.
I remembered the batteries being dry cells around 200VDC and fact checking found this link which says a pair of 225 VDC batteries were combined to produce 450VDC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroboflash
This site has a wealth information including a .pdf of the original manual with guide numbers and offers a retro-fit rechargeable battery pack for the Model II - IV. Didn't see reference to Model 500 anywhere. http://www.stroboflash.com/Stroboflash/Stroboflash_Main.html
Agree with aborr that it may be more trouble than it's worth to revive them. Capacitors deteriorate over time if not used and need to be reformed. Once with an old Vivitar flash I hadn't used for year it didn't work but I just left it on and swapped batteries and three days later the capacitors reformed and it came to life.
