Camera parts that count the most

tballphoto · Mar 27, 2021

Im a bored drafter with too much free time. Have wanted to design a camera for years, always had issue with shutters. Never could find a book or manual on how they were designed, or actual dimensions.

What features count the most in a camera?

The RB67 bellows system being built in?

Multiple lens systems? I do remember the failed start up for a company that wanted to make an SLR with removable front plates that would fit any lens mount systems, each system had its own mounting plate.

lens that stays the same through its whole range of zoom? Kyocera Samurai had that feature, focal length went from min to max and the overall size never changed.

Would using 35mm and 120 in removable film backs/inserts be the kicker?

bernard_L · Mar 27, 2021

tballphoto said:
Im a bored drafter with too much free time. Have wanted to design a camera for years,

And who will fabricate all the little metal parts? Grind and polish the lenses? Or is it just an exercise in AutoCad or SolidWorks?

Mr Bill · Mar 27, 2021

tballphoto said:
Im a bored drafter with too much free time. Have wanted to design a camera for years, always had issue with shutters. Never could find a book or manual on how they were designed, or actual dimensions

Designing a shutter from scratch would be a good way to get rid of that excess free time. I don't know that there's ever been a book on their design, though. But if you're serious enough you can probably find some repair manuals online that'll show the guts of various pro-style shutters. Or you might consider buying a couple of junk cameras, even disposables, to see how they do it.

A book that you might find interesting, maybe even useful, is "Camera Technology - The Dark Side of the Lens." You can get a preview here:

https://books.google.com/books/abou..._read_button&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&gboemv=1

It's out of date by nearly 30 years now, but I'm doubtful that you'll find anything to match it. Digital aside, the author touches on just about every bit of camera technology with straightforward conceptual explanations.

ic-racer · Mar 27, 2021

There are plenty of existing camera designs that are near perfect. You could copy any one of them. The limiting factors making quality cameras available to photographers are corporate greed and high production costs.

tballphoto · Mar 27, 2021

its not an out of date book.

Corporate greed is one, but the industry needs to make it more complicated to force people to buy new every few years.

Sirius Glass · Mar 27, 2021

I suggest you start with designing self cleaning glass.

Donald Qualls · Mar 27, 2021

I'd recommend cribbing off the Brancopan. You can download all the files needed to 3D print one, and it's adaptable for various wide angle large format lenses. It has a reliable film advance mechanism, which is number one necessity for 35mm, as well as a reliable frame counter.

Mr Bill · Mar 27, 2021

tballphoto said:
its not an out of date book

It is, as Rudolf Kingslake said, a remarkable book, and nothing in it becomes wrong as a result of its age. But it most definitely is out of date, by which I mean that newer technologies are not covered. Had Norman Goldberg written a follow-up book I'm sure that same would have been included.

Dan Fromm · Mar 27, 2021

Hmm. Shutters for lenses used on large format cameras are no longer manufactured. Parts for mechanical shutters are in short supply and technicians who can work on them don't seem to be reproducing.

To hell with complete cameras, leaf shutters in standard sizes or parts for them -- metal, please -- are what's needed. People who can work on them, too.

wiltw · Mar 27, 2021

Dan Fromm said:
Hmm. Shutters for lenses used on large format cameras are no longer manufactured. Parts for mechanical shutters are in short supply and technicians who can work on them don't seem to be reproducing.

To hell with complete cameras, leaf shutters in standard sizes or parts for them -- metal, please -- are what's needed. People who can work on them, too.

Camera technicians are no longer being born, because Darwinism does not propogate the useless organisms...
cameras are largely 'throw away' because they get obsoleted with such frequency by the new model, and a repair would cost almost as much as buying a used camera to replace the broken one.
No one knows how a fix shutters, they only learn how to replace the entire shutter box with a new one.

Mechanically wound watch repairmen are also a dying breed. Easier to replace a quartz timed mechanism with a new one.
A retailer once showed me a Rolex...$700 new, about 40 years ago; Rolex repair starts at $400 today.

4season · Mar 27, 2021

The time-honored way to learn camera design is to start by copying someone else's design, Don't know that CAD or 3D rendering skills will be of much use there, I think you have to touch hardware.

grat · Mar 27, 2021

wiltw said:
1. Camera technicians are no longer being born, because Darwinism does not propagate the useless organisms...

Hrm. Those guys doing digital SLR repair for Canon, Nikon, Leica and the rest must be imaginary, then. Also, Darwinism doesn't really apply-- there's a far cry between genes going recessive, and niche employment. Given Intrepid's success, there's an argument to be made that some Chinese entrepreneur may step up with new intra-lens shutters.

3. No one knows how a fix shutters, they only learn how to replace the entire shutter box with a new one.

I guess I imagined paying someone to replace a leaf on my shutter.

A retailer once showed me a Rolex...$700 new, about 40 years ago; Rolex repair starts at $400 today.

40 years ago, $700 was worth about $2100 today. That $700 Rolex is now probably worth about $2800, so $400 for a repair doesn't seem too unreasonable.

grat · Mar 27, 2021

4season said:
The time-honored way to learn camera design is to start by copying someone else's design, Don't know that CAD or 3D rendering skills will be of much use there, I think you have to touch hardware.

Eventually, but I've gone through several iterations of a modular MF camera design with varying fixed cones for focal length, in 3D modeling software, without anything being printed. When I get to a design I like, that looks reasonable to print, then I'll prototype it on a printer.

cmacd123 · Mar 27, 2021

the Leaf shutters that used to be plentiful were made when their were avery large sales of them. So we have the traditional scaling problem. that was further thrown off by the market looking for in some cases for the electronic shutters for instruments. while Pictorial Photographers may have been more comfortable with Mechanical units that would work as self contained shutters without batteries.

it would be interesting to figure out if their is a market for a revival of the classic View camera shutter.

as far as repair, that is about the only way you are going to obtain a use-able view camera shutter. the ones that one can buy mostly need at least a clean and lube slightly more complex than a general camera repair - particularly if a lens has to be re-mounted in a different shutter than it was originally fitted into. if it is just a clean and lube, it is a half days work for a good technician, and their are several programs that will let someone interested learn the secrets. I doubt that the investment in tools would be over a couple of thousand dollars for someone starting out. (depending on one's abilities to make some of the special tools out of those sold for watch repair.)

wiltw · Mar 27, 2021

grat said:
Hrm. Those guys doing digital SLR repair for Canon, Nikon, Leica and the rest must be imaginary, then. Also, Darwinism doesn't really apply-- there's a far cry between genes going recessive, and niche employment. Given Intrepid's success, there's an argument to be made that some Chinese entrepreneur may step up with new intra-lens shutters..

Peel the cover and unscrew some screws, unplug a module and plug in a new module...hardly the same as removing gears and springs and levers in a mechanically timed shutter and then adjusting the timing! Repairs guys still exist, but fewer of them are true camera technicians who fabricate customization so a camera can do what it was not originally designed to do.

Christiaan Phleger · Mar 28, 2021

Oh my. Shutters are not that hard. Sourcing the materials to make the shutters and ensuring that the relevant parts have a high MTBF enough that you or the customers can "trust" the shutter to function at the instant it is called on is the more challenging part. Leaf shutters have many similarity to watch/clock parts, larger focal plane shutters like the Graflex would be fairly easy to configure with 3-D.

Donald Qualls · Mar 28, 2021

RidingWaves said:
larger focal plane shutters like the Graflex would be fairly easy to configure with 3-D.

If you don't mind the shutter housing being a little oversize (if it's mounted permanently in a camera body, or incorporates a lens board, who'll notice?), a guillotine shutter ought to be practical to build for in-lens operation. There are some good designs for mechanical guillotine shutters to be found on subminiature cameras like the Minolta 16 and 16II (and the Kiev 30), Minox A, B, C etc. If there's space available, I don't know any reason a pallet couldn't be added to time slow speeds (say, one second up to 1/30), or (sacrilege!) electronic timing used to set the delay from the first blade starting to the second. These could be made with plastic blades, too, without any loss of reliability or durability (might need metal shoes for wear points), and the lighter blades thus produced wouldn't require as much spring power, letting everything else be lighter and/or last longer.

4season · Mar 28, 2021

Fabricating one's own focal plane shutter seems more like a shop project for someone with knowledge of machine tools, and I imagine much assembly was traditionally done by hand with the aid of purpose-built jigs and tools, for instance, cutting the shutter curtain fabric to the correct size, attaching it to the laths, adding ribbons, then cementing the works to the drums. Takes me forever to do it because I lack experience and those special tools, but once upon a time, those things must have come flying off the assembly line in places like the USSR.

I botched a Minolta X700 repair, but it was an interesting example of a more modern design: Main body casting was some hard plastic, maybe a mineral-filled polycarbonate. Shutter was horizontal-running cloth focal plane, but unlike other designs I've seen, it was modular, and much was made of a slippery sort of plastic (Acetal?). Shutter module was designed to be replaced as a unit, but apparently also rebuild-able.

Much of what I've learned about leaf shutters came from disassembling and reassembling them, and staring at the things until they started to make sense. I started with a broken Hasselblad lens, then found Seiko shutters pretty similar. Dunno how they produced parts like the individual blades though! They're typically a hard, springy metal like carbon steel, yet smoothly finished, yet they must have been able to churn them out cheaply and in volume.

tballphoto · Mar 28, 2021

Things have gone down hill with modern manufacturing standards..

Look at the Gillette "fat boy razor". Its somewhat complex, its actually based upon using sections of steel tubing. Could be built that way from the start if chosen. But it is complicated in ways as gap control, adjustment, is all based on springs. A couple guys with money wanted to make them on their own brand name. They went to a company in Houston that makes machined components for jet engines and NASA. The company was amazed at the razor they were shown. And the BEST they could come up with would be 1000$ per unit for "such and impossible to make product".

When they were shown how it was built in the 1950s, they got very embarressed and left the room.

4season · Mar 28, 2021

tballphoto said:
Look at the Gillette "fat boy razor".

My folks had something similar back in the day. They were die-cast out of some sort of alloy with shiny protective metal plating, but eventually they rotted away Had they been milled from solid blocks of metal, I have no doubt they'd have been costly even then.

tballphoto · Mar 28, 2021

4season said:
My folks had something similar back in the day. They were die-cast out of some sort of alloy with shiny protective metal plating, but eventually they rotted away Had they been milled from solid blocks of metal, I have no doubt they'd have been costly even then.

brass was the metal. ww2 most razors switched to aluminum and plastic. 1952 was the start of zamac razor parts. that stuff corrodes no matter what.

no one machined a solid block of metal. it was all stamped or drawn tubing.

warden · Mar 28, 2021

wiltw said:
Camera technicians are no longer being born, because Darwinism does not propogate the useless organisms...

cameras are largely 'throw away' because they get obsoleted with such frequency by the new model, and a repair would cost almost as much as buying a used camera to replace the broken one.

No one knows how a fix shutters, they only learn how to replace the entire shutter box with a new one.

Mechanically wound watch repairmen are also a dying breed. Easier to replace a quartz timed mechanism with a new one.
A retailer once showed me a Rolex...$700 new, about 40 years ago; Rolex repair starts at $400 today.

The pursuit of horology is actually a good choice for interested young people with the aptitude for it. Unlike mechanical film cameras, mechanical watches are a giant business with plenty of work available and customers willing to spend. Since you mentioned Rolex they built their own watchmaking school in Pennsylvania to feed the system. Tuition is free and a Rolex certified watchmaker salary is $60k on average. It's very competitive to get in the school but if you like the work and are good enough you graduate with no debt.

Camera parts that count the most

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