Wall hanger to Appalachian dulcimer, or Murphy’s revenge: A not-so-easy DIY project.

Like many D.I.Y. types, my life is full of partial projects and false starts. Life has a way of pushing aside my funky inventions and crazy expressions in exchange for more practical concerns. Sometimes I just want to feel the pride and contentment that come with a finished project, however easily the victory is gained.
I was sure a tired old mountain dulcimer was to be my salvation from a summer of starts with no end. I spotted this sad thing at a flea market buried in a pile of stuff. My dream of cheap discovery was borne out that day. I pointed at the tired wall-hanger instrument poking out, sadly smothered in white house paint. It was one tiny step from the bin, and no one would have noticed the loss. The vendor gleefully took my five dollars and handed over the instrument.
Unpacking my treasures at home, I began to hatch a plan. I would do a short and sweet blog showcasing this instrument-turned-wall-hanger-turned-instrument. The decorative piece had chalky white latex smeared lazily all over its surface, streaks of wood finish peeking through the mess. It had the frets removed, and had long since given up its tuners. My blog would show me removing the paint, re-fretting the fingerboard, mounting new tuners and strings, and showcasing the final rescue. I would do it all with stuff available in my house, a true five-dollar dulcimer!

Suffice it to say, that is not how things turned out.

The first step was easy enough. Having stripped enough wood with chemicals and heat, I knew it could be done. I decided to try something different I had seen in a blog but never employed. I soaked a rag with alcohol and slowly rubbed at the house paint. To my surprise, this time it worked and worked well! I was able to bring it to the original finish without damaging the wood or creating a mess! In the spirit of my DIY aesthetic, I left some white paint. I want my repairs to be part of the journey of this instrument, so to erase the time it spent as a wall hanger would be a disservice(think Wabi Sabi- the acceptance of transience and imperfection) . I wrote a blog about this aesthetic and how it plays into my philosophy: http://www.lofianddiy.com/2016/10/the-diy-aesthetic-how-we-can-still.html .

OK- next to re-fret it. This should be easy, as the fret grooves were clean and without chips. I managed to get all the paint out as well. Here is where the trouble started. I could not get any frets to take. I have bags of salvaged frets that work great in projects and bags of pre-cut frets that are brand new. Everything I tried would either never set, or pop out quite easily.

At first, I blamed the frets for being slightly radiused. Surely that was it! I tested the radiused fret in a nearby chunk of wood and it worked perfectly, flat or not. Still, just in case, I tried lots of flat frets. No go. I figured maybe it was the way I was setting the frets. I usually use a flat fret caul I purchased from Stew-Mac hooked in my drill press, so I tried the old fashioned way- a ball-pein hammer. It spit out frets like crazy, some popping out minutes later.



It was becoming very clear why this little mountain dulcimer was slathered in house paint. The wood was cursed, never to accept a fret, never to sing out- doomed to the decorator’s dustbin. Resigned to accept that this would be a much longer project, I hatched a plan that bypassed the difficult surface entirely. I would glue a different fretboard right over this one- an antique yardstick from the Arlington Elevator Supply Company.

Yardsticks don’t make good fretboards. I already have this work-based knowledge. They say the definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result. Guilty as charged. Despite a terrible fretting experience with a ruler fret-board in the past, I was sure to try again!



You see, give away branded products like pens, buttons, and yardsticks are not going to be made with the best materials. The yardsticks are usually made of soft and cheap pine. Some are so poorly made that they warp and stretch, giving terrible measurements and becoming useless as a straight edge.

As a consummate collector of all things useless, I have been shopping for antique rulers that are not soft and are perfectly straight. The lesson the last yardstick was trying to teach was not to use a yardstick, but I wouldn’t listen. I would see the barrels of yardsticks in the antique malls of Ohio and give them a pinch. If my fingernail dented them, I would pass. Very few passed my test.

After ignoring my fears, I hand cut the fret slots, sanded the mating surfaces, glued, and clamped on the yardstick. I then used a cabinet scraper to plane the yardstick to the edge of the old fingerboard. Once I trimmed the excess yardstick and cut out the nut and bridge slots, I was ready for fretting! A side note about the fretting- not all fret calculators are made the same. I wasted a lot of time looking for something that would print a new template based on the unique scale length of this old homemade instrument. In the dirty dark old corners of the internet, I was able to re-find a tool that I used to use to get unique frettings: wfret. Not only did this tool help me get the right positions, but it showed me that the original fret positions were sloppy at best! Though fretting went largely without incident, leveling the frets was a bit of a challenge. With softer woods, you have to be careful not to overshoot the surface when hammering the frets in place. In the end, I erred on the side of caution and just gently tuned and tapped any fret buzz out once stringed.








I knew I would not waste a second on friction pegs, tradition or not! I looked in my little luthier room(guitar graveyard) and picked some thru post mechanical tuners that looked particularly terrible/awesome. The yellowed patina on the tuner knobs combined with just the right amount of rust would look so good on this instrument! Using a technique I did on a fiddle years ago, I Dremel cut off the 3rd tuner from each side and ground the end to look stock. After some simple drilling, these slid right in place. OK, now I am getting my stride back!








I ditched the original nut and bridge, opting for the bright and clear ring of cow-bone. Shaping bone is pretty easy on a power sander, and when I got it shaped I used a tiny file to cut the grooves in it. FYI, bone stinks when you sand it- try for adequate ventilation when you sand it. Or be like me and learn nothing over time. The rest of the day I smelled burning hair, a reminder of my stupidity.

Downhill from here. I strung it with banjo string and touched up the frets. It sounds lovely to me( and yes- that is all that matters), and is a funky Appalachian mountain dulcimer brought back to life in the foothills of the Appalachians!













I could not have hoped for more. A project that was supposed to be an easy one-off ended up being quite challenging, but the reward has already been great. My dear friend of 20 years, Paul, helped me kill a cheap bottle of Old Dan Tucker(10 buck watered-down whiskey for the unordained) on the rocks while passing and playing the dulcimer for hours on my shady front porch. It gives me a feeling of pride and contentment just thinking about it!

Shooting 600 with your 600, or Mamiya Universal Press and Polaroid 600SE get a CB-70 back!

Remember, the CB-70 prints backward!

The Polaroid 600SE and Mamiya Universal Press are wonderful cameras of another age. Born in the 60s, and revamped for Polaroid in 1978, the Mamiya Universal Press has to be looked at in a different context in the post-digital era.

In the eighties and nineties, cameras were about features and portability. The 35mm SLR in all its forms was king. Designed with a complexity that rivaled the finest clocks and watches, they were engineering marvels.

When the dust settled after digital blew up photography, the remaining analog film buffs and new film aficionados made up a new society of photographers that looked nothing like the 90s version. The new value system gave a higher roll to medium and large format photography. Ancient versions of photography that had been all but forgotten, like wet plate collodion, saw a tremendous resurgence. Instant photography, which arguably is closest to digital in its nature, started to represent a much bigger proportion of analog photography’s comeback than the ubiquitous 35mm camera.

I don’t profess to know why things have shaken down the way they have, but I think it has a lot to do with the medium shifting from a consumer/ professional product to an artsy, niche product. As an artist, I see all manner of ancient reproduction media only in use by artists. One of my favorite media to work in is intaglio printmaking(think plates etched like the drawings on the dollar bill). There is no logical reason to still make intaglio prints- that technology was surpassed years ago. But some things aren’t about logic.

The popular cameras of today, from the revival of most of the Polaroid cameras, the explosion of Instax cameras, the re-issue of Diana and Holga cameras, to the resurgence of boxy press cameras like the Mamiya Universal and Graflex Speed Graphic is arguably popular because they are low tech and simple. As artists and creatives, we like understanding our equipment and manipulating our images in very direct ways.

As such, many of us have taken to combining different camera parts to create whole new cameras! Polaroid conversions will combine pack film camera bodies with fully manual lenses, while there is a whole industry around converting Polaroid 110 roll film cameras to pack film and Instax Wide backs.

Arguably one of the most sought after conversions is adding a CB-70 back to your Mamiya Universal or Polaroid 600SE. It immediately makes your camera capable of shooting Polaroid 600 and Polaroid SX-70 film! I recently designed and started making the back to adapt the CB-70 directly to the camera with no more than a dollar tube of glue.

This is all you will need!

This may be the shortest tutorial I will give because the process is so simple. I print the backs in either horizontal or vertical orientation. Vertical orientation has traditionally been the most popular, but I really like the way horizontal looks. The board is designed to exactly match up with the cutouts on the CB-70. Once you dry fit your board to the CB-70, prep your board by masking over the wires and take up hook. Before you glue, test your CB-70 for functionality.

You can opt out of covering your wiring, but do cover the take-up hook when you glue it!

Line it up carefully and press it together.

In the past I have used Fix-All Adhesive Super Glue Gel I got from the dollar tree, and it worked perfectly. Do not use a runny glue, or it can drip into the cavities, making your back inoperable. I put a heavy bead of it all around the CB-70 photo window, then smoothed it down with my finger(don’t do that- it is probably toxic!). When pressing it together, I used a q tip to remove the excess that squeezed out the sides. I then let it cure for 24 hours. Though it is strong enough to use after 24 hours, it is not fully cured for about a week(sadly you will smell it!).

Note: After it had fully cured I wanted to see how strong the bond was. I pried as hard as I could short of ripping it in half and the bond held! In the end, the only way to remove it was to carefully slip a super sharp utility knife in all around and even that took the better part of a half an hour! As you can tell, I highly recommend going this route.

Done!

The final touch is you can paint the edge of the film frame with a small bottle of black craft paint so there won’t be any light leaks. If you don’t have any black paint, you can use black electric tape.

Now get out there and shoot!

PS, Please read my blog on opening up the interior of your camera- you don’t have to, but it is easy: http://www.lofianddiy.com/2019/01/giving-your-polaroid-600se-super-powers.html
PPS, My  CB-70 to Mamiya Universal Press or Polaroid 600SE are available here: https://www.ebay.com/str/appalachianfleamarket

MUP and Goose get an update, or shooting Instax Mini and wide with your Polaroid 600SE and Mamiya Universal Press!

Shooting Instax Wide with Lo-Fi 4x5 back.

Up until now, I have not featured any of my products in my blog entries. Since I am starting to create things that cannot be found any other way, I decided to change that. I will still be using this platform to talk about my smaller projects while rolling in some exciting micro-manufactory items. Anyone who knows me knows that I place a great deal of value on the one-off, the handcrafted. As a sculptor and a painter, I still get a thrill seeing the hand of the artist molded into the very essence of a piece. As a wheel throwing ceramicist, however, I understand directly the roll even rudimentary technology can play in making.

Collecting, rehabilitating, and even selling some instant cameras have been a source of joy for me since I got my first Polaroid camera in a junk bin five years ago. I have since branched out to creating parts for cameras, many with a 3-d printer.

This entry is about two of them. Back in 2016, I did a blog entry where I put Instax Mini instant film into the film carrier of a 2x3 Graflex Speed Graphic camera. You can find the link here: http://www.lofianddiy.com/2016/09/its-aliiive-orspeed-graphics-instax-mini.html . You can refer to some specifics on how that is done by reading that blog entry. Today I would like to introduce some new products I have been 3D printing and assembling and test them out with the Instax Mini and Wide film!

I am currently making cut film backs for the Mamiya Universal Press and Polaroid 600SE cameras. If you follow me on my blog you will see that I have lots of love for the famous/ ugly-beautiful Goose(600se). This love has extended to a growing collection of the extremely versatile and wonderful Mamiya Press line. I am now making 4x5 and 2x3 Mamiya Universal Press and Polaroid 600SE adapters that allow you to use your Graflex style 2x3 and 4x5 cut film holders. These holders just lock onto the back of your camera like any other adapters, with the film plane already dialed in at the exact distance. I currently sell these adapters here: https://www.ebay.com/str/appalachianfleamarket .

Shooting Instax Mini with Lo-Fi 2x3 back.

The steps are, basically, the same as I wrote about in my earlier blog, but there are some things I have since learned which make your life easier. When using the Instax Mini film, you need to put a pack of the film(already peeled from the foil) and your 2x3 film holders in the changing bag. If you are doing a pack of film, you will need 5 film holders. The rest you will do blind. The first and second time doing this will take lots of time, but by the third time, it will be easy and smooth sailing! Your first time doing this, it would be a good idea to practice with some pre-exposed film in the light. Fuji film shoots through the film instead of onto the film, so the side you see with a picture on it is the back side.

In the changing bag, run the film out of the holder one by one, slipping it out the open end. Be careful not to put pressure on the pod(on the leading end) as it can break and create a mess. Now slip one of the film holders’ dark slide out a few inches. The end of the holder will now fold down. Gently slide the film, pod first, into the opening, careful to make sure it is feeding into the film guides. Orientation is paramount at this stage. You should feel that you are sliding the picture side(smooth side) against the metal plate, and the raised pod and raised ridge side should be facing out. Once the film reaches the stop, press the folded end down tightly and push the dark slide back in. It usually fits tight, and in the case of some packs, it may need a little force. Once you have put the dark slide in, close the lock(usually in the form of a simple bent metal bar) so you can remember which one you have done. Now do the same with the rest of the holders.

Now simply shoot as you would with the regular film. Be careful, though, as this is a highly sensitive film(800asa).

Unload the film in reverse of your loading steps in a changing bag. Slip each piece of film back into the Instax cartridge, ending with the dark slide. Look at the dark slide orientation in the light so you can understand what you are feeling in the dark. Once everything is put back in, take the cartridge out of the changing bag and load an Instax camera. Since the Instax camera is just being used to process the film, put your hand or electric tape over the lens and shoot all of the film out of the pack.

Within a minute, you will have fully developed images you took with your Mamiya/Polaroid camera!

If you have my 4x5 film back, just go thru the same steps. The only difference is you will have to get good at navigating the changing bag! Though 4x5 fits nicely into the holder with zero cropping, the film guides will not touch the image. Here is the extra step: Put a roll of scotch tape in the bag when you transfer the film. Entirely by feel, tear off and tape the film centered on the metal plate under the dark slide. I put tape on the leading and trailing edge(not the pod and ridge). Then close it up as before. Once you have done this a few times it will become easy.

There are pros and cons to each size. With the Instax Mini, it is really easy to slip the film in, and easy to slip the film out. The dark slide, however, feels a bit forced and tight and can cause mild light leaks on the end of the carrier. With the Instax Wide film, there are no evident light leaks caused by the film, and the dark slide slips easily in and out. The downside is that when you are new to it, taping the film on can be tedious and difficult!

Make no mistake- using instant film this way is anything but instant! But it does save you from wet developing your own or sending it away. I, for one, really enjoyed this process and am going to be ordering more carriers!

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.