Building a 135 film format panoramic camera from old camera parts.

[Wolfram Malukker]

Main body stripped of anything I don't need for the bare minimum functions:

And got the film gate opened up to 24x72mm. I can go bigger, but this was the convenient stopping point. I will open it up wider as needed to get a good interframe spacing.

You can see I still have some work to do on the top cover plate. First, I need to remove the pentaprism section and solder in some brass sheet to get a good flat surface, and I still have a good amount of work that has to be done to finish repairing the crushed corner of the camera.

Out of all my Singlex TLS-based cameras now (I've picked up 5 for less than 30$ total over the last few weeks!) only one of them doesn't have this corner bashed in. All of them worked, but this one didn't rewind film very well and the rewind stem was bent, the PC X/M connectors were broken out of the body, and the lightmeter was very intermittent. I have kept all the parts that came out of this body and I feel a LOT better chopping this body up than some of the other cut-and-grind conversions I've seen done on much more expensive camera bodies.

 

[Wolfram Malukker]

Did a bit of work on the lens side of things. Spent some time getting the Mamiya TLR lens assembly cleaned up and working, it took some doing to get the rear doublet to clear up as both the taking and viewing lenses were very hazy. Baking in the oven for 30 minutes at 350F, three times, did the trick on one of the doublets, but the other one, while being much clearer, is very clearly separated now.

Then, came the task of mounting the lens and shutter on something with some focusing system. Lots of options, but I landed on using a 52mm focusing helicoid. I could only find one I liked in a 17 to 31mm size, so 14mm of travel should be plenty here.

To be honest, I attempted to use a 42mm helicoid but I could not fit the retaining ring for the shutter inside the 42mm threads. The 52mm helicoid will only barely fit on the front of the Ricoh-pan, but I'll make it work.

This is the first attempt at the 52mm to Seiko shutter mount.

And the lens assembly on the helicoid:

As I measured the flange-focal-distance, I got 78.2mm for the 55mm F4.5, and 72.9mm for the 65mm F3.5. When I look at the focusing scale for the Mamiya C330 this *seems* to be at least in the right direction, but now that I have the lens mounted on a helicoid, I'm going to make a more accurate measurement. The helicoid has more than enough travel for either lens, so I guess I'll have to do some careful engraving once I figure out how to calibrate the focusing scale.

Especially since I don't have any other method of focusing...