I recently added a Godox AD100 Pro to my collection of portable strobes. Compared to my shoe-mount strobes it’s more powerful (at 100 Ws), easier to mount off camera, has better battery life (it uses a rechargeable lithium battery pack rather than AA cells) and has the capability to have modifiers clipped on to the front.
The unit has a round 77mm diameter front with a metal ring for magnetically attaching modifiers. This makes life very simple from a design standpoint and also makes attaching and removing modifiers very quick. Modifier-wise, Godox produce a reasonably priced kit that looks very good. However, there’s only one grid in the set and that looks pretty thin – I’d prefer a slightly deeper grid with smaller holes to keep the light pattern a bit tighter. So as ever, I’ve made my own.
In the past I’ve made drinking straw grids for speedlights as outlined in several online articles like this and this, but to keep things simple and a lot more robust this time the grid is 3D printed. (it takes a lot less time to put together as well!)
To hold the grid in place I’ve used four 6mm diameter, 3mm thick Neodymium magnets. Rather than having them glued into recesses and left exposed I’ve designed the grid in two parts so that the magnets are hidden between the two – not strictly necessary but I thought it would look neater. An added benefit is that the mount part of the grid assembly can be re-printed and used with other modifiers … as soon as I design them.
As usual I designed the parts in Fusion 360. The image below shows what the mount and grid look like in Fusion:
Printing and Assembly
I sliced the parts in Cura and printed them on my Creality Ender 5 Pro. The filament used was Technology Outlet deep black PLA. Layer thickness was the standard 0.2mm, with a nozzle temperature of 210°C and print bed temperature 50°C. The mount was printed with supports but the grid was printed outer face down, so didn’t need any.
After printing and a small amount of cleanup all that had to be done was to put the magnets into the recesses in the mount and fix the mount into the grid. The parts were a reasonably tight snap fit so I didn’t apply any glue at this stage. If they start to loosen off I can always add some later.
The grid was placed onto the front of the AD100 and bingo – light spill control! The magnets provide a fairly firm fixing: there’s not a massively strong attraction when the grid is placed on the front of the light, but the unit can be used vertically without any sign of the grid falling off. I wouldn’t try to hang a softbox off it, but for something as light and compact as the grid it’s fine.
One thing I would point out is that the AD100 Pro already has a level of beam control included as the head can be zoomed between 28mm and 85mm, but the grid tightens this up a lot. The pictures below were taken with the AD100 at 28mm, 85mm and finally at 85mm with the grid attached (flash head is visible in the right of the pictures):
The STL files for the two parts of the grid can be found here.
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