Three years ago I took up woodworking also as part of some of my camera restoration projects. Shortly thereafter my wife 'found' a teak garden table that was left in our street by some neighbours as waste (it was missing one leg but had some nice wooden parts). I took it apart and kept the nice parts, burnt the rest in our garden heater but found that the parts were too small to build birds- and insect houses, which were my first little projects. Then one day I saw some home made sliding box camera's, not the ones made from plywood or hard board, but made like they did in the old days from fine woods (like the ones by Brian Purcell and Ivan Rose). Since the little camera's of the sliding box era seemed also very high prized, I took the challenge in trying to turn some of the wood from the garden table into a camera - not exactly knowing then what it all meant in terms of woodworking skills and need of (hand)tools.
Its now almost 1,5 year since the project took off and the camera is starting to get finished, so it seemed adequate to share my little journey in this project....
First I started collecting numerous photo's of sliding box camera's from the early days of photography in order to get familiar with the different models and their details. At first site most do look quite simple considering they are mainly boxes that slide into each other. However looking more close one can appreciate differences in details and the way they were built. For the inspirational photos look here > https://www.flickr.com/photos/193578...57719732420205
I didn't find any specific blue prints from the old days and therefore designed my own in excel (since I don't have any specific software for that task). From the photo's I choose the ones that looked most simple i.e. without hinging or collapsible parts. Here's was what I sketched for a start:
Further I made the design for the darkslide / filmholder or holder for the ground glass screen:
But most importantly perhaps was to lay down the details of the filmholder - therefore I designed this intersection on scale:
Since I had only little parts of wood, the camera build was restricted to sixth plate or 6x9 cm film.
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