Show your Beautiful Volute Shutters

[goamules]

Got another one this weekend, what a beaut!

[Steven Tribe]

Very nice!

But do they all still work!?

[goamules]

Some of them do; at least THEY SOUND ACCURATE! Oh, sorry....sarcasm from another thread!

Volutes are funny, they often don't work well, but work a little. For example, the 3 second setting? Why bother, I can remove a lenscap or open and close on T for 3 seconds counting in my head (wetplate experience). So when you try the 1-3 second settings, they often will be slow. They work on pneumatic plungers, and you can clean those out. But they also have to open then close the isis just to the F-stop setting you chose. I.E., if you set at F8, when you trip the shutter it opens partially, to the F-8 amount of hole, then closes. There is just one set of leaves. Those leaves have to run very clean, but are often dusty or whatever. I've had some luck cleaning them externally, but have been reluctant to open a Volute up to see how to clean the inside. If I did that, I'm sure they would run fine, as my good ones do. Like any shutter, they sometimes need cleaning, but I don't think the parts break - just get dirty. They are well over 100 years old now, and are precision instruments.

[goamules]

Got another one with a nice Cooke lens. Come on, show yours if you have them!

[Tin Can]

I have one, it is magnificent. Works perfectly at all speeds including 3 seconds.

[goamules]

I saw a good working one over at Mark's the other day, so I figured some of them should! This new one seems too also. Close enough for Government work, eh?

[Tin Can]

That's all I do.

I have that Cooke 8" not in Volute.

[Two23]

From c.1910, with a dandy Velostigmat lens!


Kent in SD

[Jim C.]

Here's my stash, the top row middle one is a donor, they all work, the big "Galute" with the tessar
is a little sticky on T and B need to go in and see what's going on.
One of these days I'll find a mid sized one.

[carbo73]

My first Volute shutter, quite cheap, considering it's usual prices on eBay. And it came with a perfectly working Rochester Premo B 4x5 camera. A bit of research seems to show that no Volute shutters were factory mounted one Rochester cameras, and in fact Rochester was bought by Kodak in 1903, just a year after the first Volutes, I think. So probably the original owner of this camera bought it in 1901-1902 (equiped probably with a Victor shutter, as most of them), and then upgraded it with a Volute some years later, maybe in 1908-1910. I reached this aprox. production date with it's lens, a Bausch & Lomb Zeiss Tessar IIb, serial nr. 977xxx, after reading in this forum that "The VM reports two B&L serial numbers 1,8xx,xxx from 1914, so pre-1914. The VM also remarks "by 1903, production was about 500,000."".