Vintage flash connectors

[Eric the Red]

I have a few flash bulb holders that have that push and twist style lock to plug into the camera. A few of them, most notably Kodak, the cords have gotten very brittle. Cutting up the worst of the lot, I figured out how they were built. Very simple and would have been easily rebuildable had they not had the plugs molded into a rubber/plastic plug. I had thought about trying to melt the rest of the molded rubber off the plug, but wonder about heat affecting the fiber insulator inside the plug itself. There seem to be many available at flea markets and antique stores, but how long before those cords suffer the same problem? Are there any options for replacement plugs that I can solder to, or a source for replacement cords with that plug attached?

Thank you for any help.
Eric

 

[bdial]

I think Paramount can make one, they aren't cheap though.

Standard Sync Cords – Paramount Cords

 

[AgX]

Are they still in business? Or is their website just still online?

 

[Eric the Red]

Thanks for the replies.
I did go to their website, and called the numbers given there. Both times pressing the extension number resulted in contact with a voicemail that was full, and could not receive any more messages. I found a cord this afternoon to a different camera, but with an ASA connector. My plan will be; see if the connector will fit, if so cut the odd plug off the other end, and solder it to the flash connections for a trial fire. If it works, yippee. If not, I'll keep looking for other cords in good or at least usable condition.
Thanks for the suggestion!
Eric

 

[AgX]

I have a few flash bulb holders that have that push and twist style lock to plug into the camera.

A bayonet connector. Standardized by ASA, unknown over here

 

[Bill Burk]

Honeywell Tilt-A-Mite (and some of their small electronic flash) have a proprietary “screw-on” connector and the gray wires are still somewhat flexible.

You can see in eBay offerings that there’s three different connectors with different color rings. Black is PC; Red is Leica; Green is ASA.

Most of them on sale now have Black=PC but there’s at least one each of the Red and Green.

 

[Eric the Red]

Thank you Bill, I will look into finding one of those. What I did for one, just as an experiment, was to take a readily available pc connector, and wired it into the flash, then I took one of my pc to asa(bayonet) adaptors, and used it to run on the asa (bayonet) equipped camera. It works well. I would still like to find a source for the bayonet connectors, but I can live with this style of modification.
Thanks everybody for your ideas and suggestions much appreciated.
Eric