Greetings all,
Here's an interesting story for you, well, interesting to me at least. I have a pair of newish Inon Z-240's. They are my third set of Inon's, after a pair of Z-220's and a pair of Z-240 type 2's. My Z-220's have worked great for almost 10 years, in fact, I still have one, and the type 2's worked well for 4 years, and I only upgraded to the type 4's because I sold the type 2's to someone in a pinch.
Anyway, I tend to shoot them using a sync cable probably 50% of the time. When using sync cable, the ACC button must be pushed down and turned. Over the course of many dives, occasionally I've had the button get bumped and pop up, meaning the strobe seems like it fires but very little light makes it out. Having missed a couple of good shots and blurting out the appropriate and necessary swear words, I wanted to keep that from happening again. So, I used a dab of silicone sealant to hold the damn button down. I did this on the type 2's and now on the type 4's. Worked great, 100's and 100's of dives, no problems.
Worked great, that is, until a recent dive when I noticed that my subjects were being underexposed, despite the strobes/camera being set about where I expected they needed to be. It acted exaclty like what happens when the ACC button is popped up. But it can't be that, they are glued down. Hmmmm.
I happened to be diving with Pedro Dorta, Reef Photo's Master Inon Technician Himself, so swam over and handed the rig to Pedro with a look on my face like - hey, it's broken, fix it. He looked at it, took a couple of shots, and went right for the ACC button, which was down on both strobes, as it should be. He had a fairly puzzled look on his face which I knew was related to the silicone, but I couldn't really communicate what it was there for using hand signals. Both of us kind of shrugged our shoulders at that point, and I went and shot some ambient light shots.
Frustrated, though, that I had found a great subject that needed some strobe light on it, I picked the silicone off of the strobe, popped up the ACC button, and shazzam. It fired, at the correct intensity. I peeled the goop off of the other one, popped it up, and they have both been working just fine, ever since. Sooooooo weird.
I talked to Pedro about it after we got on dry land, and he said that the ACC is actually a magnetic switch (and of course, he wanted to take them apart to check it out, which I resisted given that, hey man, they do actually still work). So what I'm thinking must've happened was that, as this was the first dive I'd done since my trip to the Philippines, that somehow during the trip home my strobes got exposed to a large magnetic field and the poles reversed. Or something like that.
Whatever did it, did it to both strobes.
Weird.
Just sharing the experience in case anyone else has their strobes enter the twilight zone.
Cheers,
Cp
