First Camera Draft: Week Oct. 3

Nicholas Vidal
Oct 10, 2024
3 min read

Updated: Dec 17, 2024

This week I put together a rough working model of the camera. The following breaks down the process of creating the camera along with the lessons learned from this first build.

Sketching

These sketches were extremely rough and were just to get my thoughts out onto paper. The main idea of this first version was to keep the original lens mount and focus system and just make the engraved acrylic, bellows, and holder for acrylic. For the holder, I would use the same material as the bellows so it could flex a bit and have a bit more tolerance.

Modeling

Modeling much like the sketches was quick and rough. For this first design, I wanted to get my first ideas out as quickly as possible so I could learn what I needed to change to move forward. Each model was just the bare bones of what needed to be there to work.

Printing

After making a model for the bellows with the tool I found I printed a set for the front and back of the camera. This print was extremely successful and came out perfectly. Along with the bellows I printed the connector piece which fit where the original bellows connector fit. After that, I printed the acyclic holder which had to be split into two pieces because of printer size restraints. These size restraints and splitting would lead to a fragile part because I didn't design it to be split and fit together. Splitting was done in the slicer program for the printer so I had little to decide design-wise. Finally, I printed out a rail that would interface to the original focus system.

Acrylic Engraving

Creating the ground glass alternative using a laser to engrave acrylic is not something anyone has done. I have searched online for a while and simply searching for it leads to no results that talk about cameras at all. I would like to further speak on this in a blog post all to itself when I have it mastered but as of now, I will keep it simple. My first attempt with the laser warped the acrylic and ruined it. This failure would ruin the progress of the camera because the warping was unsalvagable. My failure was due to my settings on the laser where I used way too much power. The power settings were meant for something much smaller than the 172mm by 172mm square. This meant that the acrylic absorbed so much heat that it started to warp and then ruin the engraving.

Assembly

Without my engraved acrylic I decided to go forward with the assembly anyway. Instead of using the acrylic, I would use vellum paper which was less favorable because of how fragile it is compared to the acrylic or glass. Below is the final assembly with the vellum paper in the middle and the rail mounted using duct tape to the holder.

Going Forward

After testing I got a slight image but due to the weird way I connected the lens to the bellows there were some light leaks. Along with light leaks, the vellum was just terrible for focusing and barely showed an image. Going forward I have to reinforce the holdeer for the acrylic and make it with connectors in mind. The focusing system didn't work that well because the bellows didn't collapse well enough. To fix this I think I'm gonna make the end of both sides a bit closer in size to each other so it folds over itself easier. Finally, I'm also gonna make a new focusing system and figure out the engraving situation.