Finding bellows material

I'm not going to get historical about bellows material here. What we all need is a suitable material with which to make a bellows and what they used 115 years ago probably isn't available today and may not have been ideal anyway.

There's much talk about rubberised fabric, blackout fabric, waterproof nylon and even the pvc inner bag from photographic paper boxes. I don't like the sound of any of them, although I may try the blackout fabric sometime. The thing that got me moving on this was finding an article by a chap in Taiwan called Salihonba. In his blog he describes how he uses patterned silk to make bellows. By applying several coats of black acrylic paint, the material becomes completely sealed to light and, best of all, remains relatively thin and pliable. And they look gorgeous...

photo: http://salihonbashome.blogspot.com/2009/06/bellows-in-shape.html

There's a lot of potential for colours here, too - an outer coat to colour the silk then inner black coats to seal against light.

At the moment, though, I'm working on a budget so I used curtain liner, which is a close-weave calico (100% cotton). I dyed this black with a clothes dye, although I'm not sure that stage was worth it. This was followed by seven coats of artists' quality black acrylic paint. I got a cheap one - I don't think Windsor & Newton is really needed for this.

The paint was thinned 50-50 with water and for the first two coats was worked well into the material from both sides. Subsequent coats, except the last one, were all applied to one side. After the six coats, there were still some pinholes, but I judged that the paper strips and the black liner would probably eliminate these.

Important: Allow each coat to dry completely, otherwise you'll just be pushing paint through the cloth.

The final coat I applied to the outside of the completed bellows. Inevitably, there will be glue marks and maybe pencil marking out. The final coat hides these.

The results can be seen above. I haven't tested them for light-tightedness, but I'm confident they'll be okay.

I'll say more about bellows design and construction later.

Catching up...I started three months ago.

This project began back in December 2010 when I bought some wood from eBay. More about that later - there's some catching up to do as I only decided today to record my progress.

Hopefully, my thoughts and decisions and the results of years of research and tracking down supplies will help somebody to realise their own dream of building a camera. I'll post links as I go.

When you start to think about building a camera, there are a lot of decisions that you think you have to make before you start. So many that it took me thirteen years to get started. It really doesn't have to be like that. When you turn the whole thing inside out, you begin to see that no decision is irreversible - these cameras are more-or-less modular. What starts life as a monorail camera can easily become a field camera - I still don't know what mine is going to be. Similarly, a 4x5 camera can be adapted to 5x7 and vice versa. Of course there may be some compromises and inefficiencies, but having a camera that doesn't quite do everything you want is much better than only having a camera in your head.

While I've read around a lot and looked at hundreds of pictures ( just google "field cameras" and click the images button ), perhaps the biggest inspiration was Jon Grepstad's downloadable book, 'Building a Large Format camera'. He goes into quite some detail about how to build a monorail camera with few tools and skills.

I think the two things that will hold up most people are the bellows, specifically material for the bellows, and the metalwork. Probably the reason a lot of builders build monorails is that they are stumped by the focussing mechanism. When you finally manage to track down a rack and pinion, the prices seem ludicrous. Call me a cheapskate, but I'm not going to spend £80 or more on a steel rack. As we'll see, these problems are not insurmountable. The important thing is to get started, the rest can take shape or change as it happens.

And now, here's a picture of progress so far. I'll explore the individual parts retrospectively in future posts.