gurdymonkey | It's here

The Duaflex arrived yesterday (a day early). It looks like it dropped through a rift in the space-time continuum from 1951 or so. I'd been completely prepared to take it apart and do a thorough cleaning, but it didn't need it. I did give the lenses and viewfinder a spritz of lens cleaner and I wiped down the leather case with some conditioner, but whoever owned this camera took very good care of it. The only thing that's missing is the neck strap - the original was plastic or perhaps vinyl, and very skinny, maybe 3/8" wide. I'm sure I can get one of my SCA buds with a strap cutter to do me a nice replacement if I want one. It doesn't need to be beefy, this thing is pretty light.

I pulled the steel film spool for size comparison and used my Dremel on its lowest setting to file down the ends of the three spools of film so they will fit. These old films are like winding and unwinding a scroll, so what starts as the take-up reel ends up going to the developer and the spool that the film started out on gets moved to the other end of the camera and is used in turn to wind up the next roll of film as you shoot. I'm going to have to make sure I instruct the lab to return the spool with the developed film though and pick up a couple spare 620 spools off Ebay or Etsy.

Of course, by the time I'd gotten that done, it was too dark to take it outside and test it. So I did that this afternoon when I got home and shot five exposures out on the street in the late afternoon sunlight.

Observations:

1. Film loading went fairly smoothly once I got the paper lined up with the spool. The winding knob moves smoothly, which means (a) the guts of this thing are in as good condition as the outside and (b) my alteration of the plastic spool ends took enough of the plastic off.

2. The little red window at the back of the camera was probably made that way to reduce the chance of a light leak, but it makes the numbers on the film very hard to see. I need to have my reading glasses with me when I take this out.

3. The viewer is going to take getting used to. The image is bright and clear, but it's flipped because of the internal mirrors. I think I need to adjust the view to the right, but no, it's to the left.

4. The shutter feels slo-o-o-o-w. No vibration stabilization electronic wizardry. At the same time, you really have to press that button to get it to click.

I do have the choice of three F-stops (for the non camera nerds, this means I can control how wide the shutter opens to let light hit the film). And there is a movable collar around the Kodar lens, which might conceivably affect focus, but I'm not sure. I turned it, but the viewer didn't show me anything because it's looking through the top lens, not the bottom one. (There is a manual for this particular model coming in the mail but it has not turned up yet.)

EDIT: I took a look (glasses on, better light) and there is an indicator notch on the Kodar lens ring and tiny numbers etched beneath it. It looks like you can adjust the lens to focus at 3.5', 5', 8', 15' and "INF" (infinity) by lining up the indicator with the number - which assumes you have a decent grasp of how far away those measurements are.