I have always been a Paul C Buff lights user, owning several Einstein 640 Watt strobes as part of my studio kit. Along with the lights I have quite a collection of PCB softboxes as well. These are one of the best light modifiers on the market in my opinion, in terms of light quality and price point.
Early in 2014 however, Paul C Buff announced that they were no longer going to sell their branded lights and modifiers internationally, and that was the worst kind of news for me after having invested a fair amount of money in the PCB lighting system. Not only can I not buy anymore PCB products (they will not ship internationally), they're making it very hard to claim warranty fixes or replacements - not cool at all.
Over the past few months, I managed to migrate over to lights that utilize the Bowens mount. The Bowens mount is quite common to a lot of different softboxes and strobes, so for me, going Bowens made a lot of sense. They were fairly prices, and easily obtainable and they aren't going anywhere.
The problem I had was that I needed to either sell all my softboxes or find a way to modify the speed rings on those modifiers to fit on the Bowens mount.
After searching high and low for a couple of months, I came up with nothing - that was until a couple of weeks ago that my old Paul C Buff stockist - 1st Line Digital - announced that they had the perfect solution for converts who still wanted to use their PCB softboxes. They had specially machined speed rings that fit perfectly into the softbox sockets. I hopped on the site and ordered 3 speedrings immediately.
Swapping over the speedrings was a relatively quick and painless process, it only takesa couple of minutes to covert a Paul C Buff modifier over to Bowens.
The standard Balcar mount on a PCB softbox.
Step 1: Undo the nuts at the base of the PCB modifier and remove the Balcar speedring.
Replace it with the Bowen's speedring.
Notice that the Bowen's speedring has been machined perfectly to fit the base of the mount.
There you go. The softbox will now work with all your Bowens mount strobes! PCB do make very nice and affordable/durable modifiers and this is the perfect way to continue utilising them on new strobes.
If you're looking for speedring adaptors for your Paul C Buff lighting modifiers, check out the 1st Line Digital store.