TravelWide Repair Question

[Drew Bedo]

TW and replacement parts are now with Mike Hakeem at Professional Camera Repair here in Houston. http://www.professionalcamerarepair.com/


I may not be able to pick it up for a week or two though.

Next trick will be getting a GG adapter made from a 4x5 plate holder. The long term plan is to mount the TW on some kind of rail system along with a small telescope. I have rat-holed a "vintage" Celestron C-90 for that project (so "vintage" that it is the old orange color with the larger eyepiece diameter). The hope is to get some 4x5 images with that stacked telephoto look common to smaller DSLR formats. Mountain peaks and such. Maybe some of those enlarged sunrise/sunset type of images too.

Don't know if I've got a tripod big enough to hold it all down solid at those magnifications. . . .another project.

Hope it all works out.

[Dan Fromm]

Drew, try y'r C-90 out on a 35 mm SLR before you do anything to mount it in front of y'r TW or (horrors) shoot film or paper with it.

I make this suggestion because the one I bought in late 1978 to use on a Nikon turned out to be completely unusable. Strong and asymmetrical central hot spot, soft soft soft, and horrible astigmatism, so horrible that it wouldn't focus horizontal and vertical elements of a grid at the same time. Eventually I that the problem was the lens, not me, and took advantage of Celestron's 25 year warranty and sent it back. They sent a replacement that wasn't quite as bad but was still unusable.

[Drew Bedo]

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried it out with my Nikon D-80 a few years ago. Seemed OK then. What a hassel getting the exposure right! The D-80 won't do Aperture Priority automatically with a non-Nikon lens. Maybe it is time to revisit that aspect of the project with a good DSLR.

Back in the mid 1990s, I lashed together a Bausch and Lomb "Discoverer" spotting scope and a Speed Graphic. Looked like something the A-Team would do if they had to break out of a junk yard. The effective focal ratuo seemed to be in the range of f/22 to f/32 . . .I was never sure. Used the eyepiece projection method and a salvaged shutter (wide open) from an oscilloscope camera.

Got a few interesting images of the rising sun behind an agricultural wind mill. Got the setting mooln behind a different mill on the other side of the county. I was using the least expensive film I could get and bracketed like crazy as the light was changing quickly. Now, both areas are too built up and the windmills are long gone. The lesson there is shoot it when you see it.

[Robert Brazile]

Next trick will be getting a GG adapter made from a 4x5 plate holder.

Speaking as someone who uses the ever-diminishing supply of functional plate holders, may I suggest that you consider doing as Jon Shiu did and just hot gluing a couple wooden runners of the proper thickness to a normal 4x5 ground glass? I have one of Jon's and it works well for me in the Travelwide. Cheap and very easy to do...

Robert

[Tin Can]

Speaking as someone who uses the ever-diminishing supply of functional plate holders, may I suggest that you consider doing like Jon Shiu and just hot gluing a couple of wooden runners of the proper thickness to a normal 4x5 ground glass? I have one of Jon's and it works well for me in the Travelwide. Cheap and very easy to do...

Robert

I did that after I found my local Hobby store basswood was close enough in dimension.

Very easy,

[Mike Bates]

Just in case it's not obvious, there are people like me with working TWs that will be interested in acquiring metal replacement parts to hold as spares until the need arises. I appreciate the effort of those pursuing a better solution.

My particular TW worked well when I received it, however after a year or so being stored in my (humidity controlled, but not so much temperature controlled) basement the focus was extremely stiff. I'm glad I didn't break it trying to move it. I disassembled it and applied some paste wax as an attempt at a dry lubricant. Thank goodness for magnetic screwdrivers getting those tiny screws back into place. It seemed to help, but I didn't force it and didn't use the camera much. I did store it in the main part of the house after that. A month or two later, I noticed it was working well again. The plastic must swell or change with temperature or humidity. I'm not sure which. It still works fine more than a year later.

The idea of suing the manufacturer is ridiculous. People who received their cameras as a result of the Kickstarter campaign didn't "buy" a camera. They invested in a startup project for with the reward was a camera if the project was successful. It really wasn't a successful project since the guys behind it ended up adding in a substantial amount of their own money to overcome problems and produce the first batch of cameras. There was never another production run as far as I know. I feel fortunate we received cameras at all. That wasn't guaranteed from the beginning. Once again, you didn't buy a camera. You invested in a startup production that didn't pan out as hoped.

[Bob Salomon]

Just in case it's not obvious, there are people like me with working TWs that will be interested in acquiring metal replacement parts to hold as spares until the need arises. I appreciate the effort of those pursuing a better solution.

My particular TW worked well when I received it, however after a year or so being stored in my (humidity controlled, but not so much temperature controlled) basement the focus was extremely stiff. I'm glad I didn't break it trying to move it. I disassembled it and applied some paste wax as an attempt at a dry lubricant. Thank goodness for magnetic screwdrivers getting those tiny screws back into place. It seemed to help, but I didn't force it and didn't use the camera much. I did store it in the main part of the house after that. A month or two later, I noticed it was working well again. The plastic must swell or change with temperature or humidity. I'm not sure which. It still works fine more than a year later.

The idea of suing the manufacturer is ridiculous. People who received their cameras as a result of the Kickstarter campaign didn't "buy" a camera. They invested in a startup project for with the reward was a camera if the project was successful. It really wasn't a successful project since the guys behind it ended up adding in a substantial amount of their own money to overcome problems and produce the first batch of cameras. There was never another production run as far as I know. I feel fortunate we received cameras at all. That wasn't guaranteed from the beginning. Once again, you didn't buy a camera. You invested in a startup production that didn't pan out as hoped.

Investing is a gamble, if the investment does not turn out you are perfectly able to sue to recover your investment. Especially as you have no accounting of where those funds went, how much were used on the project, how much for development, how much for R&D, how much for overhead, how much for lining someone’s pocket!

Otherwise you weren’t investing, you were gambling!

[Paul Ron]

Investing is a gamble, if the investment does not turn out you are perfectly able to sue to recover your investment. Especially as you have no accounting of where those funds went, how much were used on the project, how much for development, how much for R&D, how much for overhead, how much for lining someone’s pocket!

Otherwise you weren’t investing, you were gambling!

suing will not win in court. its an investment and tyat is gambeling, especially when its an experimental project. your investment compensation was the camera which was the fruits of their experiment regardless if it worked or not... that's the gamble of investing.

you have to prove neglegance n your tw company wasnt neglegent because it broke as a result of use.

[Bob Salomon]

suing will not win in court. its an investment and tyat is gambeling, especially when its an experimental project. your investment compensation was the camera which was the fruits of their experiment regardless if it worked or not... that's the gamble of investing.

you have to prove neglegance n your tw company wasnt neglegent because it broke as a result of use.

How do you know, for a fact, that it wasn’t a scam?

[rdenney]

How do you know, for a fact, that it wasn’t a scam?

Bob, stop this. It was a great idea with some product development problems that didn’t get worked out. Many problems did get solved, and the guys that made them lost a fortune. Everyone who was owed one got one, exactly as advertised. Many work fine. No warranty was implied. They were priced at a hundred bucks, and nobody expected them to be perfect. I find not a shred of evidence of dishonesty or negligence, Monday quarterbacking notwithstanding. Talk of suing over a hundred-dollar novelty serves nobody.

Let’s work the problem.

Rick “please” Denney