I wanna KLX450R : ( lol

 

Major cliche, but what the hell ... bees in the flowers around our mailbox:



I should have used the flash, it would have been more crisp. The above is a crop from this much larger photo below, gotta love 12.4 megapixels :

 

WOW,, now thats some quality! Thats freaking tight son..

 

Well connected.

 

Sounds like you know your stuff, Talca. I have a lot to learn. I used to enjoy shooting a lot many many years ago with my film SLR. I used to carry it almost everywhere. When I went digital around 2000 with a decent digital camera of that era, I don't think I have ever loaded film into my SLR again after that. It kind of makes me sad to think about that, but digital solved many things - no film costs, no film developing costs, instant review of photos, near instant upload and prints, and easy image touch up and editing, all photos on the computer and easily accessible instead of stowed away in boxes. Digital had everything, except great quality.

Since then, and I've owned at least 6 digital cameras of varying cost and quality, each one having successively better image resolutions, but seemingly cheaper build than my first Kodak digital, which even though it didn't have super great resolution by todays standards, it did take pretty darn good photos and was built pretty tough, too. Even though it was a fairly early digital camera, I remember it as one of the best of the digital cameras that I've owned, and even now when I look at some of the photos I took with it, I'm impressed with its good color and image quality, even though it's pixel count wasn't very good. So in some ways, I guess I just got tired of getting the next generation of point and shoot and expecting the quality to be much improved over the prior generation, and I was always disappointed. And for a long time, you could not get great SLR quality in a digital without a very hefty price tag - $10k+ or more.

But now with these awesome dSLR's available now, their prices are up there relative to the latest point and shoots, but even so they have come down so much, even great cameras like these - D40, D60, D90, D300, etc, and equivalents from other manufacturers such as Canon, etc, are in the affordable range (affordable being relative). This dSLR has all the great things about digital, plus has fantastic quality, too. This is the camera I wanted 25 years ago. But I'm going to have even more fun with this one because not only the great optics and features, but with this SLR unlike the one I had back in 1982, I can shoot a bazillion photos, see how they turned out right away, and if none of them turn out, no biggie, press delete, and they are gone. The cost of film and developing was pretty painful back in the day, not to mention the wait to get it developed. None of that now.

 

 

Well, snappin' pics is fun and all, but lets get to work and make this new toy earn its keep. I unpacked the "infinity table" tonight which came with two lights and stands.




Unfortunately, one of the lights had a busted socket:




I could send it back, but dang, what a hassle.




I'll just pop that little bugger out of there ...









A little glue and a clamp ...




Here it is with just one light in operation. Normally both sides would be illuminated:




But even with just one light, it makes taking product photos ridiculously easy:




Someone should freakin' pay me for this **** :




Tomorrow I'll wire back in the repaired socket. In case the glue fails, I bought a handful of ceramic sockets from a surplus place tonight for less than $10, should be here in a few days. One of them is bound to fit if I have to resort to Plan B.

 

ga dam, I need that camera

 

 

Playtime over again. Back to work.

The Gorilla glue seemed to work pretty well:








Even so, the constant stress that the bulb exerts outward on the socket may eventually overcome the glue, so I decided to reinforce it even more with stainless steel safety wire:




And to keep those bands from shifting, I layered on J-B Weld epoxy around it all. I think it will hold. It may now be stronger than the other two. Even if it doesn't hold, it shouldn't fly apart and short out as it might do with glue alone.








Putting the light back together:










The back:




Back in service, the infinity table is complete.




All this might seem like a lot of work to save that light, but it really wasn't and saved me the hassle of having to send it back and wait while they ship a new one, just for a $1.50 cent part. Worst case, I have a handful of sockets I purchased surplus on their way to me and if for some reason the above repair job doesn't work out, I'm sure one of them will fit.