Workstation for the scatterbrained, or staying focused on a million little things.

 

The nature of a work station is highly personal. Often you find out what you need based on lack. I notice that my workstation is lacking when I have to get up and go to another room to fetch things, but it seems impossible to have everything at arm’s reach. This back and forth not only slows your progress, but can create quite a mess for you to clean up when you are done with your task. It doesn't help that by my very nature I am a jack of all trades, master of none.

Is it possible to have everything within your reach, saving you from those trips to the basement, the attic, other rooms in the house? I often look to others who are doing just that to help me craft an idea. Neil Pert, world famous drummer of Rush, is someone I thought of. Every possible drum is within arm’s reach. Ready for every possible challenge, never even having to stand up, much less leave the room!





That is my starting point. At the very least, stay in one room and do what I need to do. At best, do not get up from your seat! My workstation idea builds on an incredible foundation. As I have mentioned in my other blog entries, I am all for creative repurposing of existing things. Full disclosure: This particular thing, though, was quite pricey. You may have seen them in the big box store- a rolling 5 ½ by 2-foot tool cart with a wooden top. This was a perfect solution for me, as I could easily fill every bit of it with tools, hardware, and even some project bins. I found a nice one on Wayfair with the Frontier brand.







The seating that would compliment this workstation would have to be comfortable and sturdy, so I actually went with a drum throne(back to Neil Pert!). Roc N Soc makes a manual spindle throne with backrest and footrests that is built like a tank, but not packed with features I will never use(no recline allowed!). 

Since this workstation is basically already built, I will just tell you about the modifications. The long, flat, and wide drawer became a pull-out desk. I just simply built a box with a piano hinge at the same height as the top of the drawer. The drawer was designed to hold a lot of weight, with double bearing tracks on each side, so I didn’t have to reinforce anything. The piano hinge allows me to use the drawer for storage as well. I keep various small power tools and a laptop in there to run my mini CNC and my mini laser etcher. I clamped and glued a ¼ inch perimeter of lauan onto the top of the work surface so those tiny screws and springs would have no place to go.






The actual work table got quite a revamping. I added clamp rails along the edges and to the back so I could clamp down my mini grinder, mini lathe, mini sander, mini jigsaw, etc., as well as clamp down projects as needed. All I had to do to add this simple feature was to route out the grooves with a router and guide. I added a work lamp with a magnifying glass- screwing in the stand on the corner of the table. I love using it so much that I will likely add another on the opposite side.




I mounted a chemicals and cans(oil, cleaner, acetone, etc.) tray high up on one side of the cart- within reach, but not in the way. This has already come in handy, as one of my 3 in 1 cans started leaking, and it was neatly contained in the tray and the paper towel holder directly below it came in very handy!



The last feature I added was a wall around 3 of the four sides. When I have tons of stuff going on, I don’t want to chase any of my mess onto the floor, and this little wall served other very practical purposes, as well. On the back side, I continued the clamp channels. This is where I will mount clamps for storage. I ran a power strip along the back. The original cabinet has a power strip but it is along one side, so this serves me better. I mounted a little tool rack on the right-hand wall and mounted a spring for my soldering iron there. I mounted a small metal whiteboard on the back wall I can write on or put up project notes with magnets. The back wall is also handy for mounting things that may not be permanent, like the Dremel with the wand, and small clamps. I even have my internet radio sitting on the wall.



Note: The bottle of whiskey is not a permanent feature- I cannot figure out how to keep it stocked.

My world is almost complete! The only thing I want to add to this workstation is a vacuum system. Though my workstation brush works OK for now, I would love to have the option to plug a hose and attachments into the back wall and clean up with the flip of a simple toggle!

Though I am sure this workstation will not solve all of my scatterbrained problems (I have many), I have already found that it shaves precious minutes off of my repair and assembly work!

Crazy space shuttle forensics Acmel Polaroid camera conversion. or: The X- Files inspiration.

This is a screen capture of the X files episode with Mulder shooting an Acmel m-165.

Several years ago, I was casually watching X- Files reruns from a DVD while putting in my time on my treadmill, and I spied the oddest and most wonderful large camera. Mulder was taking pictures of a crime scene with what I would later find out was an Acmel Polaroid m-165 forensics camera. It was longer than it was wide, white all over with a Polaroid back grafted to the bottom. It had a bulbous barrel tip with flashes and multiple holes in the front- more like a Gatling gun than a camera. It looked like something Hollywood would make up, maybe for a sci-fi movie involving a space shuttle and future space station. You hold it the way a gunner on the deck of a ship would hold a mounted gun-one hand gripping each side with the barrel sticking straight out in front. Mulder was pointing the barrel of this gun at a body on the ground and snapping instant shots! He was not looking through a viewfinder, but rather at the subject itself by aligning two lasers. Sadly I do not remember which episode- one minute buried in 3 packed DVD sets!

It took me a while to find it, and even longer to acquire it( I am notoriously cheap when adding to my Polaroid collection). Though there is little information on this particular camera out there, I pieced together a picture with lots of google searches and blogger comments. The camera shoots 337 and 339 film. This is an extra wide and large integral instant film- bigger than spectra, and it does not have internal batteries.

The day I got it ( I believe it was from a dentist's office in California), I went on eBay and ordered some 339 films ( by now way expired- like all integral film it was discontinued). I loaded the handles with 4 C cell batteries and tried it out. The film was(not surprising) dried out and pretty useless.

I suppose I could've given up there, but this camera is sooooo cool! It comes with detachable fronts that dial in different depths of macro, some even having auxiliary flashes. The built-in front contains a ring flash and an exposure/ aperture preset. When you plug in these fronts, they push a series of pins in, resetting the aperture and speed to the optimal settings for the lens! I have 3 of the 5 fronts that were offered, and two of them I got from Germany! There was no way I was going to give up. I had to find a solution to this unique challenge(that nobody in their right mind would care about!). Little did I know then that this effort would lead to lots of mini failures!

My second effort was to borrow from a technique I developed to shoot old Kodak instant cameras. If you are not already familiar with this method, I go into more detail in my Kodak instant camera revival blog entry. In a changing bag and using the dried up integral 339 films as a sleeve, I would tuck Instax Mini into each shot and reload the film into the cartridge. One of my shots came out okay(albeit backward due to the type of film being used). Almost all the others failed. The problem was that the rollers got bogged down by the fatter film.

A side-note about the integral film: Polaroid took years and millions of dollars to refine their film. The last days of Polaroid had them putting 12 shots in their Spectra packs. The packs were sleek and light, with just the right amount of paper and chemicals for a perfect spread and perfect shot. Kodak had a brief period of R&D on their instant films before they were sued, so the pack was chunky and there were only 10 shots in a pack. The remade Polaroid film that started in 2009 under “The Impossible Project”, later to become “Polaroid Originals”, had and still has only 8 shots per pack. Fuji used and refined Kodak tech independently, and has refined film packs.

The irony is that the more primitive films(old Kodak and Impossible film) are more robust and therefore easier to twist to the will of artists, creatives, photographers, and tinkerers! The Impossible /Polaroid Originals film is great for transparencies and other manipulation by peeling, and the old Kodak instant film makes a perfect sleeve to tuck Instax film into!

I then tried all manner of cardboard shaped like the film and taped onto Instax. It was terribly impractical(waaay too much time in the changing bag) and met only with mediocre success. Disheartened, I put it back on the shelf for another day.

Occasionally I would come back to it- trying to figure out how to get the modern integral film to shoot out of this bygone film format. I bought a more dried up film and allowed myself to be disappointed each time. My Acmel Dine camera sat like a proud paperweight- a useless, but an interesting artifact of the days of Polaroid film in laboratories all around the world(Polaroid made a film that was the fastest in the world at the time-20,000 iso!).

A couple of years later and some Polaroid Pathfinder 110 conversions behind me, and I looked at this shelf object in a different light. You see, the Pathfinder to packfilm conversion is a time consuming and tedious task with a lot of filing and cutting of metal and plastic, dialing it into exactly the same film plane as the original film back. After doing something that challenging, the idea of film conversion kept returning. This camera would go from artifact to actual usability!

My third stab at getting this camera functional was to mount a pack- film back on the camera. It actually came together quite quickly, and since there were no powered rollers to contend with, it was very simple. My testing was successful, albeit quite a bit less functional. The problem was the film speed. This camera was designed for 640-speed film, so all of my shots on packfilm were underexposed. Since everything was automatically set, it would require many modifications to the pins in the add on lenses in order to dial in the film speed and aperture to fit the 100 films. Yikes! Sounds like work. It also sounds like too much modification. I want to shoot this camera, not a jumbled together facsimile of it!

Ok, so back to the drawing board. At this point, I started to disassemble various “donor cameras” for the project. I started with a Fuji wide 210 camera, before deciding that I was not OK with the film reversal phenomenon(Fuji film exposes through the back to form an image on the front, and Polaroid exposes through the front to form an image on the front). Then I started to dig into a spectra camera, only to discover that there was way too much junk I would have to account for(gears and motor) in between the film plane and the mirror. Finally, I settled on the Spectra 1200ff. Since it folds down into a small sandwich, it has all of the good stuff compacted down beyond the film plane, including the motor and gears!

Lots and lots of taping, cutting, bolts, nuts, and epoxy later, and I had a chopped down Spectra back on the rotating panel of the Acmel. All I had left to do was come up with the electronics that would allow ejection. I have been down this road before with Fuji Instax wide and mini cameras that I have modded, so I knew what I was looking for. Little did I know what I was digging into!

First off, this is a professional scientific camera with challenging parameters and amazing capabilities. Nothing about this camera is simple! At first, I thought I would use a multimeter to test and determine where I was going to draw the power for my new spectra bottom. I know I could have used the film battery to create it as a standalone, but I liked the idea of being able to shoot old, depleted battery film without effort. I wish I had gone the simple route. The cluster of wires was challenging to assign due to lack of significant voltage ( I needed 6 volts), so I decided to trace it back to the circuit board to find out where the missing volts could have been added. This made my brain hurt because as soon as I had developed a theory, I would find something that shot it down! I think I lost a half a day to that stupidity!

Eventually, I decided to have a switch and a circuit that pulls directly from the battery, and not sent thru any of the existing electronics. I rerouted the wires and mounted a red button momentary switch on the back. In hindsight this independent switch actually worked better, as I could shut the power off and devote 100 percent of the battery to film ejecting(normally you have the potential for the flash and the eject motor to draw power at the same time).

I think it is worth cautioning that whenever you are tinkering with one of these cameras with a built-in flash, be very careful around the flash capacitor. They store tons of energy and are just looking for the right sucker to zap(seriously, the charge could kill you). I use a big fat screwdriver with an insulated handle and bridge the cap pins, and the report and spark make me jump every time. This project was no exception, as the camera has a big ring flash and even plugs into an external flash with one of the fronts. I eventually want to build a variable capacitor discharger, but not today.

My hack is not pretty, but here you can see the red ejection button and a pivot button that swings the whole assembly 90 degrees, allowing landscape or portrait with the film!

My proof of concept works- and well! I have run a couple of packs of Polaroid Originals Spectra film through it with very amateur results. The camera has 10 part lightness to darkness exposure compensation, and in the heat of the moment I turned it in exactly the wrong way!

So my takeaways: 1. The Spectra 1200FF is a perfect candidate for organ donation.

2. This camera is going to take some getting used to. Though exposure control is robust, no two fronts behave the same when it comes to lighting.

3. It takes 4 C batteries and they cannot be cheap ones. The combination of the big ring flash and the film ejection will not work with dollar store batteries.

4. This camera is a blast to shoot! I am going to love burning thru some Spectra film with it! I have some ancient scientific grid film that still has some goop left in it...

Houston, we have liftoff!

Addendum: OK- so here are some samples that will help establish a baseline of functionality! They are all overexposed(user error). It has 10 levels of exposure control so that should not be a problem in the future. I got one of those "bad" spectra packs, so there was a lot of reinserting the darkslide and partial pulls(any black lines or vignetting was from that). There is a shadow of wire in the lower right that has since been fixed.

Each photo represents a different front lens module. 

A partial cure for Spectra Scarcity Syndrome. Or: Go wide or go home!

This is my ghost dog, Ollie.

If you have never gotten out that little rubber spatula to get the last of the peanut butter, this post may not be for you. For the rest of us, the idea of leaving any toothpaste in the tube or wasting leftovers is sinful. You are the ones I am writing this for.

Instant film has seen a wonderful little resurgence after digital all but crushed it in the beginning of this century. Thanks to The Impossible Project (now Polaroid Originals), most integral film styles that Polaroid made were rescued. There has been a wonderful photographic/ artistic renaissance around the new SX-70, 600, Spectra, 8x10, and I-Type films.

Lately, the Spectra film has been scarce. As far as I can tell, rumors of bad batches that jam and weak batteries caused Polaroid to slow distribution to a crawl. As of this posting, you can find some Spectra black and white film at some retail outlets.

As you may have guessed from my other postings, I save everything! There is a part of me that is always preparing for the post- apocalyptic future. I like to think it is left over influences of my childhood in the 80s and the nuclear scares of the cold war, but it likely stems from my two decades existence as a working artist/odd jobber/educator in Appalachia( dumpster Christmas is one of my favorite holidays!). When I find a thrift store Spectra camera, I check the film door. If there is an old pack half used left in there, it actually helps my buying decision. Consequently, I have quite a few partially spent packs from all of the instant film types hoarded in my film fridge.

Most old film is fairly useless, but occasionally you get lucky. I would like to share this simple trick with you: This Spectra hack is so you can try your luck with old film. The first thing to go in old film is the battery. The built in battery in the pack is what powers the camera and ejects the film. I have found that I can take a 600 or SX-70 battery from Impossible or Polaroid Originals that has been emptied, and transplant it into the Spectra pack! When you finish a pack of Polaroid Originals/TIP film, there is easily enough battery power to shoot 20 more shots or so.

This is a full Spectra pack from 2005 and an empty impossible 600 pack.

The first thing you need to do is move the film you want to shoot out of the Spectra pack. You will need a changing bag for this, and it is a good idea to have a light tight box to put the film in. This part is really simple- just put the film pack into the changing bag along with a light tight box. Then slide your hands into the bag and start unloading the film by sliding it out of the pack one by one. As you are doing this notice two things: One, notice the orientation, as you will have to put it back in the same way you took it out. Two, gently touch the pods on the end of the film( there are 3 per sheet). If they are hard and crusty inside, set those shots aside. They may be good for other projects but they will never be used as film again. If the pods feel soft, like they may have some viscous fluid inside- those are keepers! Put them in the light tight box.

Once you are done, and the film is in the box, remove the Spectra pack from the bag. Now let's get the batteries out of the packs. The Spectra pack front will unsnap and fold down easily to remove both the metal spring and the battery. Pay attention to the orientation of the spring, so you put it back the way you found it.

I should mention that this is a battery, and ideally you don't want to short the positive and negative spots, or handle it carelessly in a way that could deliver a bit of a shock(or a scare). Next, remove the cardboard back from the spectra battery. All you have to do is remove a light cellophane and they come apart. Put the cardboard on the backside of the 600/SX-70 battery and line up the battery holes. Now trace the shape of the Spectra onto the 600 with a sharpie.

The next stage seems a bit sketchy, because you will be cutting away the difference. If you carefully marked your 600 battery, you will be safe. Since you will be cutting close to the battery, use insulated handled scissors. BTW, this may be a bit of overkill because the battery isn't really as close to the edge as it looks.

Now slide the fresh battery into the Spectra pack, making sure to slide it into the grooves that secure it and push it all the way in. Put the spring back in and close it up. If you have already forgotten the orientation of the spring, just look for the part that has an indent for the film hook in one corner and match it to the space in the pack for the film hook. Snap the front, and you are ready to load it!

Put it back into the changing bag with the light tight box. Re-load the film sheet by sheet, leaving out the ones with dried up pods. Make sure to put your dark slide in last. Orient the dark slide by feeling for a tiny slip of mylar on the takeup hook corner.

Now you are ready to shoot!

In this demo I chose a pack of 2005 Spectra that I knew was going to be a long shot. I eliminated two for dry pods, and packed the other eight. When you mess with expired Polaroid integral film, do not expect much! I ended up with two interesting shots with 33percent and 70 percent coverage.

Personally I love the “bad pull” look of expired integral film. The harsh orange and purple cast is pretty great contrasted with the golden curtain, and each of the 3 pods can often behave differently giving a striped look. There is always something a little unsettling about the interior space in the image as well.

I , for one, think this was worth it! Who says you can't get blood out of a stone?

Come to the dark slide- together we will rule the galaxy! Or cheap and easy DIY dark slide for any camera.

I get all of my stuff second hand. I am a second level consumer, and proud of it. I will scour bargain bins and buy boxes of junk hoping for diamonds. Many of my cameras and equipment have been patched together with found parts. I don't believe in trickle down economics but I strongly believe in trickle down commodities. I own things that were once worth a lot- and if I get in my time machine, then I am materially wealthy!

Sometimes you cannot wait to luck into that missing part. That is when you fabricate. The easiest fabrication I have done was making my own dark slides. If you don't know what a dark slide is, Wikipedia describes it as: a wooden plate or metal plate that covers the sensitized emulsion side of a photographic plate. One 20^th century use for a dark slide is to remove a back from a camera without exposing the film within. I have two camera backs without dark slides, both Polaroid 100 type backs- one for the 600SE and one for my speed Graphic.

One can make many replacement dark slides for pennies on the dollar. All you need is a black sharpie, scissors, aluminum flashing, and a ruler. It is also helpful but not necessary to have a burnisher. I found that fairly thin flashing works best-it cuts cleanly with scissors and fits best into the slot without the risk of distorting or damaging the slot that you feed it into. Having said this- the thinner metal is bendable and not hardened, so you have to feed it in carefully until you are used to it. Any thing thicker will have to be cut with tin snips, and my experiment with that was not as successful. I spent a lot of time cleaning up the edges, and I did not like the resistance I felt when pressing it into the slot. If you use tin snips and thicker metal you will have to burnish the edges with a file or burnisher.

First measure the width of the slot and remove about a 16^th from the measurement. Then measure the length of the entire body of the cassette. Cut a rectangle using those measurements, but add 2 inches to the length. Try feeding it into the cassette. If the slot is too narrow, you may have to remove a bit more from the side. There is usually at least ¼ wiggle room in there, so don't worry! Hopefully when you feed it fully in you see about an inch or more still sticking out. Don't worry if the metal did not fully feed into the cassette. Pull the metal sheet out and cut a gentle concavity to the feeding side with your scissors. Look at the pictures for the concavity. This is so the end does not just butt into the inside of the cassette, but rather feed into it.

Now you have the dark slide and everything else is just finishing. If you have a burnisher, burnish the edges. If not, just make sure there are no jagged edges. Put the dark slide fully in and measure the part sticking out. Make a mark at an inch and an inch and a half. Trim off the rest. Fold a tab at the 1 Leave enough sticking out of the cassette inch mark so you have one inch sticking out.

You can leave your dark slide like this and call it done, or improve on it. If the first one didn't work perfectly- just trace and do it again! It is cheap and easy. As a final touch I like to hit mine with a wide sharpie to blacken it. I would not recommend painting, as it increases resistance and could stick.

There- the easiest project you have ever done. You have been drawn to the dark slide.