I am looking at building a LF camera or two (starting with a 4x5) and I got to thinking, we have some great hardwood in Australia, cedar, jarrah, black-butt etc and I was wondering if any member here had made use of them? Any ideas or suggestions?
I am heading into the Sydney Wood show tomorrow to check out the tools and timber and was wondering what to look for.
Whilst I'm not in the league of major camera or furniture makers, I think you could do well to have a talk with Michael Connor, if he is there. I would think he may be at, or near, HNT Gordon Planes, who would be my first port of call regarding virtually perfect, wooden hand planes.
Michael Connor has a very nice shooting board, I saw one this afternoon, coupled with one of Terry Gordon's planes you can easily achieve 1/1000th of an inch shavings at a perfect 90° angle.
I am in the middle of the beginning of making an 8 x 10 field camera out of Australian Lacewood with bronze hardware. The boards I have are quarter sawn with beautiful figure. Due to limited resources, my first effort will use Cambo components for lensboards, bellows and back.
I have no experience making cameras, but I did build my kitchen cabinets from Lacewood and quilted maple . Lacewood is beautiful, but watch out for splinters!
Greetings from Townsville, Magpie.
I made a 6x17 panoramic view camera using Jarrah for the front and rear standards.
Jarrah is really nice to work with, beautiful colour and really solid (weighs a ton), the only drawback I had was that it was prone to splitting although that may have been the particular piece of timber used.
Not sure of your level of woodworking expertise, but Australian hardwoods are ...hard. They are far from the easiest of woods to work: sharp tools, with repeated trips to the stone are the order of the day.
They are certainly very beautiful, but some have a tendency to not be particularly stable: I would avoid red-gum in particular. Jarrah is lovely and stable but heavy as all get out (as are quite a number of the others).
Dean Jones of razzle fame has done some wooden cameras: ask him too.
Hi Brendan - the knees must be better if you are planning to lug around that much weight! Or do you have a few sherpas to help you out?! No camera building experience but as decking timber Australian hardwood is very unforgiving - just what you want in that regard.
Cheers,
Tony