Update on the 8x10 camera project
Hello my Camera Making Friends:
I have spent most of the last couple of weeks doing the engineering on the Seattle Camera Makers Camera. Oh my God! Now I know why more people do not build these babies from scratch. Here are some numbers for all you accountant types out there.
The camera is made up of 10 sub-assemblies not the five mentioned in the plans. There are a total of 368 parts and this is fewer than the design in the plans would need if we constructed it as shown even though there are less than 200 parts indicated. Mr Vail left a helluva lot out of the plans. I changed some things from laminated panels constructed of glued up 1/4 inch sticks to solid pieces for the sake strength, ease of construction and appearance. Of those 368 parts, 172 have to be sourced from some hardware store somewhere. The other 196 we have to make. It is funny that we call these field camera "wooden" there are only 38 pieces of wood on the whole thing (and that includes 4 pieces to make each frame or box). 70 of the pieces are custom machined metal mostly brass. 1 piece of leather, 2 pieces of fabric, 1 piece of glass and a whopping 84 pieces of paper (bellows stiffeners). Now that all of the engineering is complete, there is really no need for a prototype (sorry if I seem wishy washy, but looking hard at the whole thing for more than a week has made me confident that we will do no harm by charging ahead, there are no real surprises in the design now, there were.)
Now that I absolutely pretty much mostly
know everything we will need, I could use some help finding it. Also we should appoint someone (not me) to give our money and shopping list to. John was able to find some excellent sources for screws. Thank you John.
Do any of the Seattle Camera Makers do CAD? I do, but I am already going to have my hands full with getting everybody keyed in on how to make their own knobs, brackets, focusing shafts, tilt arms and pivot studs. I have made freehand sketches of each part we need to make with dimensions and some general construction notes for each of them, so really we just need to turn this mound of paper into CAD drawings for everyone. I have also prepared parts lists, but these need to be boiled down to something more legible. There must be 30 or so entries that say #1 Brass Flat Head Wood Screw 1/2 inch long. The lists (one for each assembly) need to be put into a spreadsheet and have all the duplicate parts added up and collated while keeping track of which parts are which part numbers. So, do we have any spreadsheet wizards? This will be a pretty big task that is harder than it sounds.
John and Andrew Austin have their wood, and I have mine, Deborah still needs to find time to get to Compton Lumber or Crosscut hardwoods to get her Purpleheart. Purpleheart with White bellows,,,,Damn! I NEVER would have thought of that. Anybody else got their wood? I have a bunch of Cherry, Maple and Walnut for sale cheap if anybody needs some.
Shall we finalize plans for where and when we will be doing some wooddorking? There is some pretty complex woodworking in the Back Assembly and I do not mean the finger joints. Does anybody own a large and heavy router table? The ridiculous things they sell at Sears do not count. An Overarm Pin Router maybe? I still don't have my table saw or thickness planer or radial arm saw moved from storage yet because there isn't room, but I did get the bandsaw and jointer moved. The bandsaw finally got the 4 inch riser that will allow it to resaw boards 12 inches wide if anybody got a good deal on some really wide stuff. My jointer sucks so bad. It rattles and clanks and sounds like the dickens. Need to work on that before we try to do any woodworking on it.
How are the bellows coming? Do we need to do anything to help the ladies with that? Would a wire frame soldered up as a pattern help? Who wants to make that?
Does anyone have any questions or free time?
email me at :
barryjyoung@yahoo.com
Thanks and see ya
Barry Young
Camera Delinquint
