Success At The Tinker Table

Work continues on the next installment of the "Meet the Beast" series. With the challenge of figuring out the video editing software, combined with holiday events that effectively make this a short week for me however it seems like a good time for a brief interlude to talk about other photographic goings on. I haven't used this forum to discuss large format photography here very often. There's the 8x10 pinhole project which I hope to have more on soon, especially with World Wide Pinhole Photography Day fast approaching. I'd have to go back through the archives however to see if I've ever even mentioned that I do in fact own a 4x5 camera that sports a traditional glass lens.

The optically okay-ish 135mm Wollensak Raptar in its once recalcitrant Rapax shutter, now brought to heel.

Part of the reason is that, interesting and excellent as the format is, I'm not currently equipped to do much with 4x5. Even if I could find a 4x5 enlarger that would fit my budget the darkroom is crowded with a medium format enlarger. Nor do I have the capability of scanning 4x5 without stitching, and even then I have greater ambitions for my negatives than a scan can provide. Even so I'm sure it would have been getting some now an then usage if not for the fact the shutter has been on the fritz for some years now, at least until recently.

The camera itself is a Tower Press Camera, which is actually a re-branded Busch Pressman, itself a less well known competitor to cameras like the Graflex Crown Graphic. The lens I have for it is the 135mm Wollensak Raptar with matching Rapax shutter that in all likelihood was the one that came with the camera when it was purchased new, probably some time in the late 1940's to 50's. When it came into my possession in the mid 90's the shutter was sticky, a common afflictions for leaf shutters of this vintage. Setting it for a half second exposure meant the shutter would stay opened for about a full second and so on. I compensated as best I could and the exposure latitude of the film took care of the rest.

When I dug it out last year from the shelf where it had remained almost completely disused through the starting a family, raising young kids years however the situation had deteriorated. Shutter speeds were now all together unpredictable. Sometimes even at the slower speeds the shutter seemed to open and close after the duration set, while at others it might stay opened two or three or more times as long and occasionally even required a little coaxing to close.

The 4x5 Tower Press camera. I've modified mine to suit my purposes, removing the rangefinder and accessory viewfinder to save weight. For my needs the ground glass is the only thing I'll ever use for framing and focusing. I've made a few other modifications including re-skinning it with a burgundy vinyl I believe was intended for upholstery.

My options? I certainly couldn't try to work around it, especially with the price of 4x5 film. I could send it away to one of the more reputable independent service people who will work on a shutter like this, but even if all it needed was a simple CLA the cost of this, combined with two way shipping (probably international) would have exceeded what the lens is worth. The Raptar optics are okay but they're hardly celebrated or sought out. I'd be better off putting the money towards a newer better lens with a more reliable shutter. With nothing else to loose and armed with a few bookmarked sites and an old PDF of the service manual I managed to scrounge, early last summer I made the fateful decision to give it a go myself.

 Now I'm not a complete putz when it comes to this sort of thing, but nor do I have skills enough to dare taking apart anything I'm counting on ever using again. I rated my chance of success as 50/50 at best. For a long time it looked like I had been too optimistic. Based on what I'd read it seemed my best hope was to douse the timing mechanism with enough lighter fluid to clear out the decades of gunk that was slowing everything down. Complicating things was the foolish decision I made not long after I acquired the camera to remove the useless (at least to me) old style flash sync posts. It hadn't affected the workings of the shutter at the time but the missing parts made the innards of the shutter mechanism hard to match up with what the service manual said I should be seeing and it was done so long ago that I had no hope of filling in the blanks from memory.

Never the less I went through several cycles of seeming to have it working only to assemble it all and find there were still problems. Eventually I reached a point where no matter what I did the best I could accomplish was to get to the point the shutter could be cocked, I could press the release and hear noises as though it had fired properly, but this was accompanied by an actual opening and closing of the shutter blades perhaps one time in ten. A difficulty I confronted each time I made a new attempt to get things put back together right was a particular spring that didn't seem to fit back in the way the service manual suggested. I had no idea if I had it in right or if this was responsible for the persistent problem I was having.

For the next half a year I went through spending a day or two trying to get it working, giving up in frustration then coming back to it a month or two later to give it a fresh go. Then last month a breakthrough. Rather than focus on the problem spring I decided to give the whole mechanism a good once over, discovering in the process a loose part that looked suspiciously like a particular piece of the flash sync assembly that had probably been floating around the housing for the better part of twenty years. Once removed the reassembled shutter again fired. The only problem was that it seemed to be firing at the same speed no matter what I set the dial to. Probably that cussed spring. With luck though it would mean just one more foray into the cog-works. With new determination I resolved to reconcile the positioning of this one last part with the diagram in the service manual. And it was then, right then at what might have been the finish line that the one thing I had been so careful to avoid for months happened. Tensioned and nearly into position an untimely slip of the screwdriver tip caused the spring to do what springs are wont, leaping out of the housing into some nook or crevice unknown.

My tinker table is but a small island of semi-organization cleared away from what is otherwise a junk storage area in the dank basement of our century old house. After an hour\s search I had to reconcile the cost of any further wasted time with the microscopic odds of success. If one were looking for a needle in a haystack they might well give up in frustration with the phrase "Forget it, this is like looking for a tiny hair-thin tension spring on Joe's basement floor."

Time to pack it in then. I had a few little boxes of spare camera parts but I had nothing even close to this spring. It's not like I could make a replacement myself was it? Well... was it? I mean that's crazy. Even if I had that kind of hair-thin springy wire there's no way I could twist it into the right part. But did it have to be that kind of wire? All it did was keep tension on a tab as it moved back and forth perhaps a millimetre. As long as I could fashion a part that did that, who cares if it's like the original part. After months of fiddling with that tiny little spring it took five minutes with needle-nose pliers to twist a paper clip into just the right shape to go where it needed to go and do what it needed to do. After all my doubts about how to position the tiny lost spring there was no doubt my paper-clip spring was in there just right.

The shutter has a few little quirks now. For time exposures it doesn't work on the "B" setting on "T" I have to give it a quick press to open the shutter as it will close if the shutter button isn't immediately released. When cocking the shutter if the speed is set to anything slower than 1/25th I have to give the shutter release a little tweak to make it stay. When the shutter is tripped though it fires at the speed set. I don't know that a shutter speed test would find it's particularly accurate, but there's no obvious lag and I don't imagine there will be any need to compensate any longer. Overall it's working better than it has at any time since I've owned it. Losing that little spring proved to be a lucky break after all.