Broken AF360FGZ anyone?

I seem to recal a couple of posts about the battery compartment door on the 360, mine has been getting steadilly worse (at staying shut) for quite a few months, Today I came up with a solution which may or may not be of use to anyone with a similar problem.

I drilled a very fine hole through the side of the flash casing and into the side of the battery compartment door, I then inserted a cut down 2inch dressmakers pin (removing the point obviously ) the pin head is large enough to get my fingernails under for removal and the pressure on the door from the batteries helps hold the pin in place.

Hey Presto, no more annoying flying open and scattering of batteries just when you need the flash.

If anyone wants and help and pics of the modification drop me a PM.

PM on its way.

G

Or you could post the fix here for everyone to see...

OK guys, forget the PM's seems a few of you have this problem, the attached should give you some idea of where to place the pin, just get the hole straight to start with and you wont end up with two holes in the door like I did Also make sure the pin is going behind the battery contacts

I used a pin vice for the drill bit but I suppose you could get away with a Dremmel (or similar) if carefull.

One other word of caution, you have to do this with the door closed in order to get the holes lined up, just DONT break the drill bit off halfway through drilling like I did or you may end up with a permanantly closed door, I was lucky as I managed to push the pin through and prise the door open

Ah, clever...

Good idea thanks. But for the bucks you outlay for this flashgun you would expect the finish quality to be a little better
Maybe you should pass on your quick fix to the Pentax bigwigs and embarrass them into fixing the problem

The AF360FGZ suffers from, what I believe, is an outrageous design flaw and I think Pentax should offer to take them all back in exchange for AF540FGZ's. They obviously learned their lesson from the AF360FGZ's poor design and made sure that the problem would not reccur.

I have seen the same kind of problems in numerous devices. For some reason there are not many designers who can come up with a decent battery door...
My old flashgun for example, a Regula Variant 740-2mfd just had a nice front cover which you could slide off.

Its not rocket surgery either

The people who designed my Sunpak hammerheads had the right idea.. you get a little cartridge in the battery compartment which you remove, put the batteries in, and then put the whole lot back in the gun as one unit. This means that you haven't got the spring pressure from the contacts forcing against the door. I would have though that allowing an extra couple of mm inside the case to do this wouldn't have been beyongd the wit of the Pentax design team.

It also means that you can have a spare cartridge loaded and ready to go.. a couple of seconds to change batteries.. very useful if you're doing a wedding or similar job where speed is of the essence.

Cheers

Liam

The last Metz flash I looked at wad the same. You load the cells into a battery cartridge and are ready to go

I have an old Vivitar series 1 which also has the cartridge.

with the current designs it comes down to production cost in the end...
Ever looked at the battery door of a Pentax MZ-10? Luckily you don't have to replace the batteries in that thing to often...

If they would have designed it properly it would have been more expensive to build and it would mean a huge increase in price to the end user.