Adding extra rise to a Chamonix 45N-1

[David R Munson]

With the help of Hugo at Chamonix, I have modified my 45N-1 with a taller front standard, this in the interest of not running out of rise as often. It adds 17mm rise to make for 62mm available rise instead of the stock 45mm. A nice, easy modification at a reasonable cost that fixes my problem, and another instance of Hugo being super-helpful.

A little more about it and more pictures on my blog.

[Kirk Gittings]

sweet!

[Lachlan 717]

Nice!

Any chance of seeing a photo of it folded?

[David R Munson]

That's the photo I forgot to take, actually. I'll be doing it shortly and will follow up here once I have.

[vinny]

Flip that lens board over for even more.

[David R Munson]

Unfortunately it won't go on that way. Big-ish rear element and a circular ridge on the back of the board make it not work out properly. I'm not sure if it really needs to be drilled as off-center as it is, but that's how it was mounted when I bought it, so c'est la vie.

Here's the photo of the camera folded. Not much of the standard sticks out (not enough to be a problem).

[dave_whatever]

An alternative worth considering for anyone running out of rise would be making a wooden block to sit between the front standard frame and the moving focus bed. It would need a screw with a flush top (say a hex bolt) to bolt into the focus bed, then a socket somewhere on top to mount the original standard into.

I wish I could find a photo of it but some time in the last few months I saw a chamonix for sale on the german ebay site where the owner had done exactly this, only in his case it looked like he'd made it with grooves to basically lock-out the front swing to guarantee parallelism with wideangle lenses, but a knock on effect was it would have given him extra rise. I've probably not explained that very well.

[David R Munson]

Dave:

I've also thought of that solution, but haven't yet implemented it. Sketches done, but I haven't bought the hardware yet. If you ever do come across the photos you were thinking of, I'd love to see them.

[Corran]

Seems rather superfluous. You could have tilted the camera up and used the front and rear tilt to correct the verticals, or used a proper center-drilled lensboard ($15 on eBay), neither of which would require all this effort. But whatever makes you happy.

[David R Munson]

I'd say that adding a taller standard is a lot easier over the long run than having to fiddle with tilting the camera, tilting the back and lens, etc every time I need a bit more rise than the stock front standard offers. Swapping out the part took all of two minutes and makes the camera better suited to what I need. I'd rather have that than have to fudge it.