I may use the guts of off the shelf manufactured strobe, say the Chauvet Techno Strobe 2000, which has a 75 watt strobe with a max strobe rate of 20 fps.
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What I'd like to do is to reduce the xenon tube to a 40 watt. Do you think that would work with circuitry that was designed for a 75 watt tube?
Also, I have another strobe, an American DJ Snap Shot II, which is a 70 watt strobe and has a max flash rate of 15 cps.
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If I put a 40 watt tube in the Snap Shot II, would I be able to strobe it at a faster rate (with an external trigger, there is an input for this) at 20 fps without damaging the circuit?
The simple answer is you just decrease the size of the cap and leave the voltage the same to decrease the power. The tube will not be changed - power is determined by the capacitor and the voltage it is charged to, not the tube.
Tube life should remain the same by decreasing the power and increasing the flash rate in the range you are talking about.
The strobe is designed to work at 1-15 fps and at one second intervals you may get 70 watt-seconds and at two second intervals you may get 35 watt-seconds per flash . . .
Chances are it will work fine if you just reduce the capacitor and try that - usually the trigger circuit recovers much faster than the main strobe, so it should adapt to a higher flash rate.
I can't tell from the literature if the strobe you have will work with the controller you want to use - that would need more research.
The only other problem you may run into is the quench time requirement for the tube. The tube needs a rest period before voltage is applied to it - normally that is taken care of by the cap recovery time. It flashes and discharges the cap below the voltage that will sustain an arc through the tube. By increasing the flash rate it has less time to quench, and with a smaller cap the voltage will recover faster.
The tube design determines the quench parameters and you don't have that information.
Just reduce the cap to about half the current capacity value. Use a photoflash cap rated at the same voltage as the original. Observe polarity. (electrolytic caps have very loose specifications as a rule a typical cap spec may be minus 10% / plus 50% - one reason to use a photoflash they keep the spec tighter - the other is they discharge faster -low inductance low ESR)
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Not usually necessary - in fact it isn't necessary to alter the voltage at all. The lamp will flash - it is dependant on voltage/trigger alone. The power and brightness is determined on the energy in the cap which in turn is capacity and voltage.
The disadvantages of lowering voltage - it isn't always easy - if this is just a cheap voltage multiplier it is easy to lower the voltage by removing a stage. Assuming the flash trigger circuit is happy with lower voltage and doesn't require a different trigger transformer.
His easiest, cheapest, safest recourse is to try lowering the capacity. That alone will probably work with no other modification necessary.
He could lower voltage and change the tube - bound to be more expensive than a cap.
And he wants to increase the flash rate from 15 to 20 fps - the 70 watt tube would be loafing along and probably outlast a 40 if its running at 40 WS.
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