john wilton
18-Aug-2008, 11:09
Lucky new owner of my first press camera, a Pacemaker Crown Graphic 4x5 with side-mounted Kalart. What a beautiful machine. Only issue is a VERY dim rangefinder spot. Unusable, even with an (included) filter onr the field (eyepiece end) window. Spent the evening researching this; I'm afraid getting a piece of semisilvered mirror from Edmund, cutting it; removing old mirror and installing new might be beyond me...there was one horror story of difficulty removing old mirror and stripping threads. But I stumbled on something that made the unusable usable: when a fingertip obscured the field window, it actually became usable as a split image rangefinder...one could see the otherwise very faint spot. So with a bit of masking tape covering the top half of the field window, and a bit of ND gel so it doesn't overwhelm the spot quite as much, I can try out the camera, see if it works for me and contemplate a more permanent solution.