Alright. Here is the vent reducer attached to the reflector shade. You can see the JB Weld here. I’ve actually sanded it already. But essentially, what I did was insert the vent reducer all the way in until one of the reams—mending ream here or joining ream here backed up against the inside of the shade here. And then you could see here, you could see some of the yellow epoxy, I put three beads of yellow epoxy on the inside. That set it up so it wouldn’t move because that was a fast-curing epoxy and then that allowed me a working time and room to go ahead and apply the JB Weld. Make sure you mix up enough JB Weld. It takes quite a bit two very large beads, and then don’t be afraid to get it on your finger. It’s not a bad epoxy. It comes off quite easy with mineral spirits. So you can take your finger and just smear it on. You can also wet your finger with water if you want to get it really smooth. Just smear that on really good and make sure that you press it into the seam nicely. Let that cure and dry overnight and then sand it.

After the JB Weld cured and I sanded and this is all set up, I went ahead and broke the chef mate diffusing material, cutting pad and I laid it on a flat surface and I traced out the inside with a pencil and then the outside with a pencil, and then used a pair of scissors and cut this out a bit off the Chef Mate cutting mate. So this is going to be the diffuser that we’ll attach. This would be the diffuser that we attach over the ring line.

The next thing that I’m going to do is go ahead and trace out the pattern for the flash in it. In this build, this is only my second build on the ring flash. I’m going to be building it for a Nikon Speedlite SB-800. So all I’m doing is I’m taking a piece of paper and I’m tracing out the flash head on the paper and then I’m going to cut that out as a template. This is the cut out for the Canon Speedlite 580EX on my existing build. I lined it with foam so that it wouldn’t scratch that flash.

Here is the SB-800. You want to adjust the head to such that it controls our upward. So here is your ring flash. You’re going to be mounting it as such, just like this. So with your template, you need to mark with your template which side of the ream of the ring flash is so when you place your template on approximately there, you’re going to cut it out correctly so that the flash head mounts correctly. Otherwise, if you flip this around, you’re going to be cutting the template wrong and you might have to scrap the project or fill that hole and cut another hole. Okay. There is the traced template for the SB-800 Nikon Speedlite.

Alright. The next step is to cut this out. Not an easy task so be careful again, it’s sharp when it’s cut, when you use a drill to cut a starter hole and here is your tin snips. Again, wear safety glasses. And a larger bit. And now that you’ve got a nice starter hole, you’re going to begin trimming with your tin snips. Be very careful. Cut on the inside of the line, test your hole size with your flash, it’s probably going to be a little too small obviously which is good. You want a nice tight fit. What you’ll wind up doing is taking a sanding wheel and smoothing that out and opening the hole just a little bit larger.

Okay. Here I the flash access port that’s cut out. I used these tin snips. Now the next step is to use your trustee drill. So this is definitely a tool that you probably need to invest into. If you don’t have it—if you’re a hobbyist, these are invaluable, really.

I took my gloves off. I have better control with this drill. I’ll just demonstrate here what I’m going to do. I’m going to clean up some of these edges and some of the edges I couldn’t get a clean cut close to the line. I’m going to bring that in tighter. You got to be very careful here. Wear eye protection, preferably goggles. There’s just a lot of shavings that fly all over the place so be very, very careful.

Okay. After about 20 minutes of drilling and checking and rechecking for the fit with the flash, I’ve got just about the right fit. There’s a little bit of slack in there, probably roughly 32nd to 16th of an inch which is okay because we’re going to line this with some type of soft resilient material to protect the flash head. I might actually go with duct tape this time. But the next step, you want to take some sandpaper and just clean up the edges.

Okay. Now that I’ve got the hole cut out for the flash head, the next step is to take my diffuser ring that I cut out and mark the spots for drilling holes in the ream around the ring light here to fasten the diffuser with zip ties. After you’re done drilling out the holes in the diffuser, line up your holes, verify that everything looks good, and that step is complete.

Now I think I’m ready to go ahead and prime the outside of the shade and paint it black along with this sleeve.

Okay. There is the reflector shade of the ring flash primed and painted. Okay. Next step, we’re going to bend the bar stock. The first bend that we’re going to make is this bend right here. This is 2 ¼ inches. Now in the second build that I’m doing, this is a Nikon SB-800 and here is the synch chord. It has a threaded mount in the bottom of the synch chord. So instead of tapping this hole here, I’m just going to drill a quarter-inch hole for this screw here to screw through the plate and into the synch chord mount.

Okay. I came down three quarters of an inch and drilled a quarter inch hole for the synch chord to mount. And then 2 ¼ down, we’re going to bend a 90 degree.

Okay. That’s the first bend. That’s complete. Second bend will be a 90-degree bend at roughly 3 ½ inches here. This is a critical bend because it’s going to set the depth off of the ring flash for you.

Here is where you might need an extra hand. What I’m doing here is I’m determining where the bend is so we got the duct tape in the hole, we got the flash mounted, we go the first two bends done. This is the most critical bend right there where I had it marked. You need something straight and just hand jig up your setup. It’s very important and very critical to get that bend flush and correct so that you’re flash is mounted correctly and will hang tight in its position.

The next step that we’re doing here is mounting the flash. We stuck the entire end of that last bend through the ring flash and we’re going to do a loose mount of the flash to determine where we’re going to put the hole for the camera and also where to cut off the excess to mount to the bottom of the ring flash.

Okay. We made the first hole and tapped it and here is the captive screw here to mount the camera. Here it is with the D200 Nikon Mounted with the Signal 150 and teleconverter and the SB-800.

The next step is to apply foam to the bar and foam on the inside of the reducer and then attach the diffuser.

Here we are with the final product. We put the foam here on the base that we made. The SB-800 going into the ring flash, zip tied the diffuser on the front, take a quick shot here of this ornate. It looks good.