Last Wednesday I woke up rushing to turn in my 6.002 p-set. Since it was a pre-lab I needed a copy of it for reference, and I didn’t feel like scanning it and being 15 minutes late to recitation. So I took out my handy Nikon D70 and took some quick shots of the pages.

I got to the last page…*chunk..ddddrrrr* *flisp* *flisp*

The. Shutter. Is. Not. Opening.

Mirror. Not. Flipping.

Camera. Broken.

Yeah…how anti-climactic is that? The last photo you ever take is a .002 pre-lab. I knew you were dangerous course 6! Psh.

Anyway, while the camera is off to Nikon to be nursed back to health, I’m borrowing The Tech’s d300 (drool) to document the building of my 8×10.

Macro shot, anyone?

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There is very annoying thing that happens to a project as you start closing in on completion. All of a sudden all these little nit-picky details that each take at least 30mins to do pop up. Like hey…I need to cut slots, I need to cut screw holes, I need to recess the wood here, I have to mill that..

What consoles me is the fact that, hey, this thing is starting to look like a camera. I seem to have this crazy idea that I’ll finish it during finals week—my two finals are on Monday, so once that’s over I’m freeee! But, no, I really mean finishing…as in finishing the wood…polishing the brass.

Hey, I like to be optimistic. If it doesn’t get done? Well, I’m signing up for a year membership to the hobby shop anyway.

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Perhaps the most time consuming part of this whole endeavor is milling, drilling, and filing all of the brass pieces. It definitely puts a whole new perspective on things when you start looking at all the little pieces of machined metal all around you. Although most of that work is automated now, it really makes you wonder how anything got done back in the day when files were the most readily available thing.

Making a hole in a piece of brass takes three steps. First, you need a center bit to drill a small hole right where you want it. For most of my pieces, precision isn’t necessarily required, so I’m eyeballing hole placements with a drill press and some scratch marks to save time. When precision is required, a milling machine is definitely needed.

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Now that I’m comfortable with most of the machines at the hobby shop, the progress on the camera is definitely increasing in pace. This week I’m wrapping up work on the focusing rack and starting on the front standard.

• body
  
• base
• focusing rack
• front standard
• ground glass and negative holder
• finishing

I can confidently say that I’m finishing up the toughest and most complex part of the camera. I’m also hoping that my ground glass arrives soon so I can finish up some simple things on the ground glass and negative holder frames.

Here is what the camera looks like so far.

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The end of February and beginning of March was spent trying to find all the necessary hardware before I could move on with the rest of the camera. I was able to scrounge up most of my brass pieces from McMaster-Carr and SmallParts, but I was delayed in finding a brass rack (brass pinions were everywhere). Eventually I found it right under my nose at McMaster-Carr after some user interface issues (Biyeun!Fail). The whole incident is quite embarrassing.

With the brass finally available, I spent most of March learning how to machine the parts that I needed. I also spent most of March realizing that I was a Physicist and not an Electrical Engineer, and the whole process of switching majors left me without much time to take photos of the machining process (but I’m sure I’ll have some of those soon).

A week after add date, I also decided that, with all this work put into the camera, I really ought to receive some credit for it. Unfortunately, this idea came the night of the Spring for-credit UROP proposal deadline. But after some emails, I was able to get a proposal in by the following Monday. Now I have the best UROP ever, with Thery Mislick (from the Edgerton Center) as my supervisor.

I assure you…more is to come.

The beginning of February was dominated by mitered frames. I had three to build: one for the base, one for the film holder, and one for the ground glass. Unfortunately, the shipment of my ground glass was going to be a little delayed, so I left the frames for the film holder and the ground glass unfinished.

An example of one of those frames.

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The second week of MIT’s Independent Activities Period came around and I visited the MIT Hobby Shop for the first time with a plan, determination, and a hell of a lot of inexperience.

I wasn’t exactly a mechanical engineer. Moving blades frightened me. And I had no idea where to begin. Luckily Ken Stone, the director of the Hobby Shop, did, and with each new task he taught me how to use another tool.

By the end of IAP I finished my camera’s body:

The camera is made out of cherry wood and brass. To my luck, the Hobby Shop had some cherry shelves that they wanted to recycle for an amazing price. I quickly bought a decent stock, and set to work planing the wood to the correct thickness. When I had finished, I cut one of the pieces up into the appropriate dimensions for the camera body (as I sketched out in my plan. Ken then showed me how to make the (annoyingly difficult) comb/finger joints and the slot for the inside frame (hooray for routers and dado sets).

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Around the end of my second fall semester, I found myself obsessing over the quality of my negatives. As I started experimenting with the Student Art Association’s Speed Graphic, the addiction to large format quickly set in. However, I was hesitant to purchase a large format camera of my own—the ones I fancied were especially expensive and I was on a student budget.

In November I had the brilliant idea of building my own view camera. I wouldn’t start at 4×5. No, I’d start with an 8×10. And forget a monorail. I wanted a beautifully portable (and complex) field camera.

As soon as the idea set in, it infected my thoughts throughout the semester. I was itching to get started on the design, but I waited—if I started before finals week, I would never get my work done.

At the end finals week, I started creating a theoretical design in SketchUp. I read up on the design in several places: Rayment Kirby, The View Camera Construction FAQ, The View Camera Zone, and a few forums. No one had a design for an 8×10 field camera, although Rayment Kirby offered a great description of a 4×5 camera. I spent the last part of December and the first week of January processing the information and creating a design which looked like it should work, and I probably made it more complex than it needed to be with several movements.

In the meantime, I spent my two weeks at home working on a bellows design. My mom brought me to a fabric store where I bought some blackout cloth, faux leather, and black poplin. I spent a week and a half trying to find the proper angles for the ends of the ribs (made out of file folders), and the end of my stay putting it all together (right down to the hour before my flight back to MIT).

The evidence of my labor:

The bellows for an 8×10 camera are quite large. I didn’t quite realize the scope of the whole project until I laid out the stencils. (I’m ~5′6″)

I turned my room into my main workshop when the garage got a bit too cold. Early on, I thought the floor might be a great place to work, but my cat evidently thought otherwise, so I put a big piece of plywood on top of my desk and dresser.

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