Looking for lensboard for Busch Pressman 4x5

[John Moore]

Hello,

I am looking for a lensboard for a Busch Pressman 4x5. It measures 3x3" or 71x71 cm. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

[Kevin Crisp]

John: If nobody coughs one up I can send you the exact dimentions, they aren't hard to make. I've seen maybe 3 or 4 of these on Ebay in the last 6 months, so they do come up. They usually go around $40- $45 each.

[Chauncey Walden]

I'll second that. If you have one to work from, they are very easy to make from two sheets of hobby shop aluminum and some epoxy.

[Andy Andrews]

Although this an old post, used Busch Pressman cameras are still being sold and new owners may not know that original spec. boards can be had from Midwest Photo Exchange <mpx@mpex.com>. They are precision-manufactured in California out of aircraft aluminum and fit my Pressman even better than the original boards. The original boards were two pieces of mild aluminum, die-cut and spot-welded together.
Because the spot welding left dimples, the front of the board had to be ground down, making it slightly convex. Midwest's boards have no spot welding and are perfectly flat. They also feature some super-black optical shop coating on the interior face, rather than plain flat black paint that Busch used fifty-some years ago.

As to the complaint of modern lenses not fitting into the front standard cavity. ALL of the newest Schneider lenses will fit fine on my camera. It's the lenses from 30 - 40 years ago, with their large back cell diameters that don't fit. Look up the specs on Schneider's or Rodenstock's websites, if in doubt. You can, in a pinch, use a rather large wide angle on your Busch by unscrewing the back cell, removing the camera back and screwing the cells together from the backside, rather than trying to fit the whole lens assembly from the front. It's awkward but that was the way I got my big, old Super Angulons to work on the Pressman.