Me | Bowens to Alien Bees – 26|02|11

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Modify a Bowens S-Mount

A short post on how I very quickly and easily modified my Bowens Beauty dish to fit my Alien Bee studio strobes.  Having spent a fair amount of money on Bowens light modifiers before switching to  Alien Bees, I was keen not to push the Bowens  S-mount kit into early retirement . The simple spring loaded design of the Alien Bees ‘balcar’ mount makes it very easy to quickly adapt most light modifiers to fit the strobes snugly. All you need is a 6mm drill bit (and a drill), a pencil, ruler and some paper.

Hopefully these pictures will give you a clearer idea of the modification. 

Pincer circled in Blue

Firstly use a piece of paper and a pencil to mark the distance from one of the Alien Bee pinch clamps to the light unit metal plate (it’s around 22mm). This is then used to (semi) accurately transfer the depth on to the Bowens mount, showing you the correct depth to drill.  

The point of the pencil in the picture is where you drill your first hole

Using the piece of paper with the depth marked, draw a line onto the S-mount. 

Drill your first hole anywhere except directly underneath the S-mount square nobules

Once you have drilled your first hole simply repeat the marking process on the opposite side of the mount using a ruler to give you a rough opposite. 

I roughly estimated where the opposite hole needed to go using a ruler

Four drilled holes later and the Beauty dish now fits my Alien bees perfectly. 

You can see the Balcar pincer sitting in the newly drilled hole