Friday, October 11, 2019

KW Patent Etui

I've been doing a little repair work on my two Patent Etui plate cameras.  Both had some pinholes in the bellows which some black fabric paint took care of. Soon after I got my first one I dropped the back and broke the ground glass.  I purchased a replacement glass panel, but did not know how to put it in place.  A couple years later I got to looking more closely at the back and realized that I just needed to take out the four little screws in the  back corners which released the glass and the two little brackets that hold it in the frame.



Both cameras seem to be working well now.  I'm going to order some 120 film which I will use with the Rollex roll film back.

These pictures were made on some expired Tri-X in my Minolta X-700.

2 comments:

JR Smith said...

My old eyes can't tell...what is the lens on this camera? Looking forward to your images...what kind of film are you going to shoot?

Mike said...

The front view is of the Patent Etui with the Meyer Gorlitz Trioplan 4.5/10.5cm. I have Trioplan lenses on a couple other cameras from the same era and they have always produced nice results for me. I like to shoot fast film in this kind of camera as that usually gives me more versatility in a variety of lighting conditions. I've had good resullts with TMAX, Tri-X, Arista, Fomapan, etc. Another advantage for me is that the faster films also allow processing with PMK Pyro which yields great depth of tonality, but at the cost of a stop in speed.
I have some TMAX 100 and some Acros on hand now, but the low contrast of the TMAX numerals on the backing paper make it almost impossible to use with ruby window cameras. The Acros is better in that respect, but the low ASA and narrow DOF makes distance estimation very critical.