Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire My Frankenstein Project - A 3D printed camera from parts

A while back I was experimenting with my large ToyoView 4x5 view camera by attaching NATO rails & QR Camvate handles to it in an attempt to use it like an old 1950's press view camera.



Basically I was going to attempt to shoot large format negatives like it was an old Graflex Speed Graphic camera. Below is a handheld picture I took of my daughter Olivia (right) and her climbing partner Faye so I was pleased with the initial test results.



It was a fun project to kill time on during the evenings but once I got it finished, my mind turned to another desirable camera that intrigued a lot: The Alpa 12 TC. This is a much smaller medium format camera that is brutally expensive. Looking out on eBay right now there's one for $7k and another for $25k.



So the idea popped into my head to see if I could use an old camera body as a film transport & then using a 3D printer, fabricate a custom lens mount for one of my large format lenses. The goal of this project would be to teach myself how to 3D print using a friend's printer & hopefully wind up with an interesting camera for about $100 using camera parts I already had laying around. The first step was to find a suitable junk camera to build the working camera from. This 1939 Zeiss Ikonta folding camera had a frozen shutter and the lens was unusable from the fungus that had grown inside of it. I got it for $24.95 on eBay.



Using a Dremel & a drill I was able to remove the bellows, lens, brackets and internal mounts. This left me with a simple 6x9cm film transport that I could load 120 film into.



I decided to use the OpenSCAD programming language to model my objects with instead of attempting to design them on screen using a mouse. This was the first prototype I was able to render on screen but I improved the design before it was ever 3D printed.



I found a projector helicoid on eBay to use as the focusing knob to attach the lens to. This solved one problem but created a big obstacle for me as to how to attach it to the 3D object I was designing and then how to attach a large format lens to it. Fortunately after much searching, I found a guy in Belarus who had a source who was machining the exact two flanges I needed. Score!



While waiting for the mounting flanges to arrive, I start trying to visualize how all of these parts are going to not only fit together but also stay attached to one another once I get it assembled.



The early designs had a lot of support columns printed to support extended pieces of the design. This made for a lot of tedious cleanup breaking & filing all of this extra stuff off the lens mount. Much of the refining of the latter designs was figuring out how to make this ugly tangle of supports disappear.



I found an old fresnel screen for a couple of bucks on eBay so I used it as a focusing screen to see where distant images hit the film plane on the camera body. By trial & error, I had to figure out based on the extension range of the helicoid how far the lens needed to be mounted in front of the camera. It needed to start precisely at infinity and start focusing closer as the helicoid was turned and extended.