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Originally Posted by Mike Jordan
The problem is the flash duration. There are some high speed strobes available, but they are expensive. I don't know what flash you used with this, but what you need is a flash that reads it's output and when it has hit the right amount of flash, shuts itself off. The Vivitar's with Thysistors will do this. A lot of people use the Vivitar 283 and 285 flashes. You have to get them close though. The closer you get them, the quicker they will shut themselves off, resulting in better stop action.
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Mike is describing a flash equipped with a
quenching circuit and a good many of the more expensive flash units have one. It also looks like this one could have also done with a quenching circuit; the 2x4 frame for the bulb smasher is way overexposed on those surfaces where the light has hit it head-on.
I remember seeing in
Scientific American many years ago an article in the column "The Amateur Scientist" about a high school student's project on the physics of shattering glass, where he had broken the fractures into four classes. In this article was a shot of a light bulb being fractured with an ordinary hammer. The student had used a collapsible aluminum foil tube formed around the hammer head to make contact with a sensor a specific amount of time before the hammer head made contact with the light bulb. You might consider putting some LED/photodiode detectors around your device's plunger to perform the same function as this aluminum foil tube to control the timing of your camera's shutter and the flash a bit more elegantly.