What do you do when you are home sick and fasting TV? 2
The answer as it turns out for me was to replace the bellows in my large format camera with a homemade version. This is not a project I recommend for the feint of heart, not because of the difficulty, but because of the tedium. A bellows is a fairly simple device that is designed to block out light and provide some flexibility so that the front and rear standards can move about freely. The bellows essentially has two layers and a set of ribs. For small cameras with small bellows, this process isn’t too bad. My Graflex View Camera has a 16 inch bellows (17 if you count the overlap to connect the bellows to the standards), with 42 ribs for each of the four sides. That’s 168 ribs that you have to cut out and place individually on the bellows. Half of them are 8mm wide and the other half are 6mm wide.
Once the ribs are in place, constructing the bellows is not that difficult. Some Roc-Lon curtain blackout material, some black fabric paint, and another layer of the curtain blackout material. Maybe I should have used something lighter for the second layer, but I really didn’t want to get two different materials. The most difficult piece was to try and get the tiny machine screws through two layers of Roc-Lon. In fact, I gave up trying to make that happen. Instead, I’m buying some super glue and calling it a day. The bellows will be permanently installed, but the only thing that will convey with the camera when I upgrade will be the lens. I think this is an acceptable workaround for something that will otherwise be an exercise in futility. I’ll post pictures when it is done.
