Thanks for the tips, Fin. I hope your holiday shots turn out well. please share them if they do.
I'm slowly working my way through the rolls and so far they have turned out well! I've bought a 7" Nikor tank from the US so I can do 2 films at once, unfortunately ePrey's Global Shipping is incredibly slow, so I'm doing each film individually... Once I've figured out how and where to upload photos, I'll put a couple up. Nobody really wants to see holiday pics!
I did think of a few more things about these cameras, which may help if you are new to them, or used to other cameras like I was! The interlock (as mentioned earlier), advance and shutter cocking system is brilliant, and may well annoy the piss out of you for a few rolls! The manual is fairly helpful with this, available on butkus.org. In a fairly big nutshell, winding will not cock the shutter unless the moving film rotates the top roller in the back that pushes a pin; unless the body is in multiple exposure mode, then one crank will cock the shutter. Meanwhile, the shutter won't fire if the darkslide is inserted in the back. The camera will fire if there is no lens, but the shutter must be cocked before removing the lens, otherwise the film plane will be exposed to light because the mirror doesn't return after shot, and the actual shutter is in the lens. If you change the back, the winding mechanism requires winding to re-cock and line up the mechanism regardless of frames taken on the back, it feels odd winding on after you have changed to a wound-on back, but you don't loose any shots.
When (or if, yeah right! G.A.S rulez!) you start collecting more bits, lenses, backs and other stuff you never thought you would need, AFAIK there is only one accessory that fits both the SQ series and the (also popular and from the same era) ETR, which is the tripod adaptor bracket for the Polaroid back. I know that the SQ and the ETR shoot very obviously different sized frames, but I also don't completely understand why the two systems didn't share more components and also lens mounts. Maybe the design team hated manufacturing... So, watch out for that as I've returned a wrongly sold lens and a crank for that reason. Yes, even the film winding crank is a different size! And annoyingly, ETR lenses seem to be a bit more plentiful and slightly cheaper!
When you want to buy another back, because you will, 220 backs go for less than the 120 ones. 220 is/was a 24 frame film with a paper leader and footer, so because of the counter mechanism and the difference in thickness between film and film with backing paper, many people think you can't use a 220 for 120 film. One of my backs is a 220, I removed the pressure plate and bent the metal spring a bit to lessen the tension and the film loads exactly the same and goes through perfectly well. Just keep an eye on the frame counter because after it gets to 12, you may be able to get half a frame in, after that it's just backing paper!
