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.

My bellows design is starting to get more sophisticated. It now has a mount for an optical viewfinder on top. All of the ugly supports are gone from the edge and the lens flange screws on from inside the bellows instead of externally like a pipe flange on the earlier designs. I'm using my old LSU drafting board as a work surface.



I hadn't programmed a Functional language since I wrote LISP programs on a VAX at LSU in the early 1980's. So I had to figure out all of the functions and how to nest them in other functions in order to draw various shapes, create negative cutouts, move them around on 3D space, rotate them, extrude a torus, "drill" holes for screws, etc. All of these functions were based on a set of constants defined at the top of the program so I could easily make global changes to the design by changing a single parameter. You can see part of one of the modules I wrote to create the lens mount in the photo.



The newly printed objects always need a bit of cleanup but it's not nearly as bad as the earlier designs. I used the calipers on the left a lot during this project. They were given to me by my high school physics teacher Mr. Richard in 1978 so I'm glad I hung onto it for 46 years.



A progression of designs throughout the last year. The early ones didn't have an optical viewfinder mount and the lens flange was screwed on from the outside. In the middle design you can see that I start printing the screw holes to the interior and rotate them 45 degrees so they're close to the corners of the bellows. The last one has the threaded flange to screw the helicoid to mounted on it. One of the interesting design challenges was shaving excess material out of the interior to prevent vignetting when the lens was extended.



Using a few clamps to hold the lens mount snugly to the body while I rivet it in place using stainless pins. After it's securely in place, I line the interior with black flocking I got from an astronomy supply store that is used to absorb extraneous light inside of telescopes.



The final product ready to be tested! I mounted a Nikkor-SW 65mm f/4 lens on the front and a Horseman optical viewfinder from an old press view camera on the top.



A self portrait I took in of the small sailboat I'm building. I had just installed the cypress seats and the black locust trimmed centerboard case. All of the following test photos were taken on Kodak T-Max 400 film & developed in Xtol 1:1 in my kitchen.



Diesel! My friend's Catahoula Cur hanging out near Brookhaven, Mississippi.



Diesel, Dwight & Ross in front of "The Condo".



The family farm: A picture of my mom's childhood home in Kentwood, Louisiana.



The final verdict is that this was time well spent. I learned a lot about 3D printing, designing objects from scratch & I was able to cobble together a functioning camera from a bunch of disparate parts. I assumed that some of the guys who visit these forums might have an interest in 3D printing so I thought I would share my first attempt at it in case any of the info was useful. Now on to my next project...

An engineer's brain never stops designing.

Well done!

Thanks! Always having a puzzle to mull over keeps me from going insane. It’s way cheaper than therapy…

Neat projects there all around. How durable are the 3D printed components? I.e. What type of material comes out of the print heads and how will they hold up to use?

This was my first attempt at 3D printing so I was curious about that myself. Some of my observations will be annoyingly vague since I didn't do any quantifiable stress tests to measure failure loads. The thing that surprised me was how hard the lens mounts were. There was absolutely no flex or softness to the material where I could squeeze it into the camera body if it was a fraction of a millimeter too large. The only way to get it to fit was with a file, a Dremel or reprint it to a smaller dimension. Because my object was was supported along all three axes, there was no discernable flex if I tried to torque or twist it with my hands. It drilled well.

Having said that, if I had a thinner 2D object I'm sure if it was long enough I would have been able to get it to bend. If I was ever going to have a part that required a certain amount of confidence in its durability, then I would probably take the time to weight it until it snapped or failed. But for the small parts that usually come off of a consumer 3D printer, I was impressed with what appeared to be some pretty impressive strength. Being able to fabricate any small object you can imagine is kind of useful.

I had a spool of plastic mailed to a friend's house so I never actually saw the items being printed other than a couple of videos under glaring light. From my understanding the 3D printer just melts the wire into a softer form of plastic & that it cools quickly to a harder material once it comes out of the nozzle.

I didn’t understand any of that, but damn if it isn’t impressive as hell. Well done!

Cool

ODONATA:

Thanks for the response. Likely, I'll never take up the endeavor given my age and lack of expertise, but I can see it being quite handy for building "unobtainium" parts.

Thanks for putting it up.

Extremely cool!!

I built a Pine Wood Derby car with my Grandson .

I did one of those with my son once many years ago. Based on the quality of all of the other cars, I had a sneaking suspicion I was the only father who actually let my son build his own car.

He did not win...

Thank goodness for smart people! That is most impressive.

Yes. Pine wood was interesting. I saw fathers coming in that would not even let their child touch the car.

Very impressive!

+1

This place is filled with very smart people.

Cool project...

I did the first operations on both of my son’s pinewood derby cars - “do it like this”, they did all the rest. Well, except for running the table saw. I can’t afford sew the finger back on kind of hospital bills.

Parents were not allowed to attend the actual competition, probably the wisest decision made by the school.

Both took 1st place in their respective years.

Plenty of YouTube videos on how to build a highly competitive car with minimal adult interaction/interference.

Nice job. I have done some 3D printing and am intrigued by the possibilities. We had some pretty high end printers at the last two places I worked but I pretty much stayed in my lane which was machining, not additive manufacturing. My grandsons have built 3D printers.

Seriously well done! Have long been a fan of large format and have printed some of my photos in a friend's lab. Also have most of the equipment to outfit a large format darkroom.