Has anyone ever bothered to make their own Speed-Ez-El?

I was just given a "whole darkroom" today and as I try to piece together the anonymous photo enthusiast whose gear I just took in...

One fact is clear. This guy knew his sheet metal.

One enlarger is a D2, and there's several "Omega" branded negative carriers. But there's also a few hand-made ones. Now I've made some out of cardboard before, and in the bunch there is one really ratty cardboard negative carrier. But three of them are aluminum sheet with pins/rivets and fairly well shaped. Home-made.

That doesn't really amaze me though. What amazes me is the box I found with almost a dozen tiny home-made Speed-Ez-El's.

That's right. Home-made.

At first I thought I'd found prototypes of the original... But this magazine blurb (lower-right corner of page) proves that these have been around since the mid 1940's.

http://books.google.com/books?id=Dl0zAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA86&lpg=PA86#v=onepage&q&f=false

And evidence dates my new "darkroom" to 1960. A sheet of paper with sketches of ways to cut smaller pieces out of a sheet of 8x10 paper... on the back of which is a memo to a certain vice president of a company that makes chimneys for gas furnaces, an address in a town not far from where I live...

So V.P. of a company that makes sheet metal products. Bingo. Now I understand. He must have been a talented sheet-metal worker, who worked his way up through the ranks, and happened to be a photo enthusiast.

Still trying to make sense out of the strange sizes he made these easels. My initial guess is he couldn't bear to waste the 2 inch strip that always seems to be left over.

That's pretty cool. I like speed ez els. So simple and they work. I have introduced so many people to photography using a speed ez el first, then teaching them about bladed easels later to keep things simple. My guess is those smaller easels may have been made for wallet sized photos. If you have the tools to cut and form sheet metal, these would not be hard to make. Come to think of it, if you flatten a round sheet metal chimney and cut out a window, you essentially have your speed ezel.

I knew a guy who owned a firm that made aluminum exhaust fans that went round and round and that you see on the tops of houses and barns and so on to evacuate the hot air from the attics. In his spare time, and for fun, he made parts for olde cars. You wanted a bumper for a 1927 Dusenburg, you got it. He also made whole Model Fords out of aluminum for the Walk Disney movie "Flubber." Disney folks needed to put the car on a gizmo and turn it upsidedown and all which way and the lightweight aluminum was the ticket. He got a big kick out of making stuff like that. Some clever dudes out there.

I never cease to be amazed at the skills (and facilities) some people have. Doing large format panoramic photography for a living, I've made and modified a lot of my own darkroom stuff over the years, but always on the crude side of "good enough". I did recently find the 4x5 to 5x7 conversion box I made for an old Durst enlarger and was surprised at how nice that was; I gave the enlarger away to an APUG'er a couple years ago.

I actually have made a number of speed easels, but they are crude even by my standards. Various sizes for 10" roll paper panoramics, mostly in the 36" to 42" range. The first was to print a cropped Noblex shot of a soon to be US President at a rally near my home.

When a friend was building a darkroom 10 years or so ago, he had someone he knew make a very large stainless steel sink for him. I think that person worked in a similar business to your guy. Very cool stuff. Put it to some use.

My homemade easels are hinged double black matboard. I like them, and there is some extra "satisfaction" in using something you've made yourself, but they are definitely more fussy than a speed ez-el. I need to use some blue painters' masking tape around the edges to force the top window down tight so the printed edges are straight with no bleed underneath.

In a different hobby, I once made some aluminum horn antennas for use in radio astronomy in Ku band ( 12GHz ). I went to a sheet metal shop and there was an older fellow there who showed me how to make one... it was really really impressive. He laid out the pattern ( correctly the first time without any sketches and seemingly without effort ) cut the sheet metal in a very workmanlike way, and made a perfect cone antenna all in about 2 minutes. His sense of spatial geometry and the precision of his cutting, bending and assembly was simply amazing. I will never forget watching him build that. I later made two of these myself and each one took me a couple hours of careful work, and neither of my efforts came out as well as his. He could have constructed a beautiful easel if you went to him and explained what you wanted...

NedL said:

...I went to a sheet metal shop and there was an older fellow there who showed me how to make one... it was really really impressive. He laid out the pattern ( correctly the first time without any sketches and seemingly without effort ) cut the sheet metal in a very workmanlike way, and made a perfect cone antenna all in about 2 minutes. His sense of spatial geometry and the precision of his cutting, bending and assembly was simply amazing. I will never forget watching him build that.

Click to expand...

I think this guy must have been like that. For him to make so many of these, it must have been no trouble at all to knock them out.

I've just started messing with the 3D printing services... I wanted to make a head-mounted HDMI viewfinder for steadicam work in the direct sun.

It's really the start of a brave-new-world for tinkerers... still kind of boggles my mind a bit. I've done 3D modeling and rendering for illustration so the concepts of the (free) sketchup software came to me very quickly. But the idea of designing a part that doesn't exist, and in a few days having it printed in plastic or machined from metal is just too cool. I feel there's a direct line from some guy mastering metal work but needing a shop full of huge tools, to a sort of "democratized" version of that.

Before long they project we'll all have 3d printers at home and we'll buy "ink", purchase files on line and print stuff vs. ordering and shipping.

Sounds crazy? I recall the "computer" in our high school computer lab, mid 70's - a big beige terminal that connected to some master cylinder upstate. My geeky brother running programs on paper strips wrapped in rubber bands, saying "someday we'll all have computers at home" and me thinking "we're gonna need a really big house". And now we have 10x the power in our phones.

Anyway, Beseler never made a glass carrier for the 67C, time to start modeling one... pardon the digression!