Once I had the design down, I decided I would start with the rear standard. I figured this was the easiest part to build. If I couldn’t build that, I knew I wouldn’t be able to build the rest of it. I took off to Home Depot to pick up the pieces of wood. This part was easy because I had all the measurement down from the design plans I laid out earlier.

Poplar wood and MDF from Home Depot

I made my way back home, cut up all the pieces to size using a jigsaw and began putting it together. Essentially I was just making a box. A couple hours later I had the start to the rear standard. I knew at this point it was totally possible.

The first part of the camera build

Next was the front standard. The only tricky part here was getting a nice round circle right in the middle of the front board for the lens to go into. I end up buying one of those compass circle drawing tools that you would use in elementary school. That seemed to do trick.

Just needs a lens now

After that was complete, next was the ground glass holder. This took me a bit of time to wrap my head around. When I was initially coming up with the design for the camera, I was planning on using a standard film holder. I couldn’t come up with a way to have the ground glass perfectly on the same plane as the film. It was at that point I decided I would not only make my own ground glass holder, but my own film/paper/plate holder as well. This way I could control everything.

Since everything had to line up perfectly at the correct depth, I figured the easiest way to make this happen would be to use layers of 0.25" thick pieces of MDF. I also bought a 0.25" thick piece of glass, which I ground down with silicon carbide. After 45 minutes of grinding and then putting it all together, I had my ground glass holder.

And more grinding… and more grinding…

It fits!

Next, the film/plate holder. I cut and ensembles five slightly differently shaped layers of MDF. I then glued them all together and clamped them down.

Layers of MDF

For the lens, I bought a 300mm Fujinon f5.6, a good cheap starting point. Plus it came with a copal shutter, so I figured that would make life a little easier for shooting higher ISO mediums such as film. I bolted it straight to the front standard with some metal plates and screws I got at Home Depot.

Cheaper way to start out before investing in glass from the 1800s

I needed a way to attach the standards together and be able to focus. I went the simple route that Giles went with, a simple long frame to allow the front and back standard easily slide back and forth. The frame was easy enough to put together. I added a bit of paraffin wax on the outside rails to help the standards slide easily. I then added a couple feet on each standard and attached it to the optical stand. I could really see my camera coming to life now.

Hey, that kinda looks like it could be a camera!

I almost had my camera, minus the bellows. My original idea was to do a box inside a box type bellows. Kind of like a telescope, but with only two pieces. I wasn’t really planning on spending much time on it, but I quickly realized that it wasn’t going to be able to focus at 1:1 or infinity, but somewhere in between. This wasn’t ideal.

I tried looking into other options, knowing that building a real bellows is a huge undertaking. I couldn’t find any decent options. I thought to myself, this can’t be that hard, it will just take time. So I opened up Sketch again and started designing it. I was now committed to making a real bellows. 😳

This bellows was going to be fairly large (over 3' long) and require paper stiffeners and two layers of 100% opaque material. I decided I would create a smaller (6" long) paper prototype before jumping straight into the full version. I cut up some stock paper, folded it up, taped it together and voilà, a prototype. My measurements where spot on. I was good to go it terms of building out the real version.