A few of you may have seen my thread about bringing back my European 13x18cm travel camera to full working order. I got the old lady for £60 on ebay - and had a great time both making a 5x7 spring back for it, and finally shooting with it again and turning what had probably been a 'shelf queen' for many years into a working camera.
Of course the travel camera has its limitations: it's built quite lightly and is fairly delicate - therefore my own logic says that due to it's age and fragility it will spend most of its time taking portraits in the studio. The second issue is lack of movements: my MPP 4x5 Micro Technical camera has the full set - including limited back movements, and I'd love a 5x7 that had similar capabilities.
My father and grandfather were engineers and making things is in my blood - even though personally I never trained as an engineer -I became a feckless photographer and musician. I decided I am going to build the best 5x7 camera I'm capable of and document the journey.
I own an enginearing company these days - more by accident than design - and earn my living making custom guitar parts, so I figured at least some of the skills are transferable - and I have fancy gadgets like CNC laser cutters to play with.
My first port of call was a design brief: what bellows extension I wanted and how small I wanted it to fold up. This lead me to designing the bellows before the rest of the camera ... as I already had a functioning 5x7 spring back design.
The bellows took me about a working day to make and I have produced a video on my YouTube channel showing the method and details. I've also shared my suppliers for others who might want to have a go at this too.
This is all just part one - and I shall be getting on to picking the wood for the main camera body (I can't stand plywood!) plus making the focus rack etc.
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Originally Posted by TPL_London
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