Thanks for all of the help.
I'm a bit daunted by how complicated this is getting!
It
is complicated, and it's a shame there's no where you can just buy what you need. I've asked about Graflex stuff on this forum before, and the answer is usually just a link to the generally useful, but poorly organized and incomplete graflex.org website.
So I've given it some thought. I don't like the idea of shaving down a piece of metal and having to try it over and over. That seems error prone and tedious, and if you shave off too much, back to the drawing board.
So what is a rangefinder cam? From the way I interpret it, it is a device to convert the motion of the focus gears to the rangefinder, in what I assume is a linear fashion. I assume that also means that width of the cam for closest focus and infinity don't vary between cams, because those are hard limits of the rangefinder itself, and that the variation between lenses is the slope between these two points. Could designing the cam be as simple as measuring the distance traveled along the lens board between where it is focused at infinity and whatever the closest distance the rangefinder focuses (several feet?), then charting these values in two dimensions?
Say, for example (with made up numbers), the lens moves 32mm along the lens board and there is a difference of 8mm in depth between the close focus and infinity focus on the cam. So for every 4mm the lens move along the lens board, it needs to move along the other dimension 1mm. The only other value is the actual length of the cam, which should be (I don't know for a fact) the same between all cams.
For those that have made one, is this sufficient? Is it necessary to map out each few feet and chart those values? Is this idea good to create a cam or is it just a starting point for a rough cam that needs to be finessed?
