Now have shutter for my 12"x10" camera

[IanG]

Went to a Camera Fair in December and found a large Thornton Pickard shutter, haggled on the price and was very surprised to find on getting home that it was a perfect fit for my 20" Rapid Rectilinear lens.

The shutter had cracks and the curtain brittle & cracked with pinholes.

After restoration

With the 20" Rectilinear lens

Just for scale

Ian

 

[smoke665]

This is so cool. To take something like this and bring it back to a functional piece.

 

[IanG]

Actually I have quite a few of these shutters, all restored this is the largest though.

The lens fits this camera:

I've also made an adapter to fit the lens and lens board on my 10x8 Agfa Ansco Commercial View.

Ian

 

[dxqcanada]

How did you restore the curtain ... or did you replace it?

 

[IanG]

Usually I replace the curtain but in this case I remove the old hardened and cracked light-proofing material with solvents and once clean re-light-proofed it. It depends on the state of the original curtain, it's quicker usually to just replace.

There's no suitable replacement material on the market, normal shutter cloth isn't dimensionally stable enough for large shutter - it stretches. I make my own which I also supply to a US restorer as well, he uses it for large Portrait Graphics, their shutter curtain is about 5 foot long.

Ian

 

[petrochemist]

I make my own which I also supply to a US restorer as well, he uses it for large Portrait Graphics, their shutter curtain is about 5 foot long.

Ian

Wow that's seriously large format, really put my humble 4x5 in the shade.

 

[IanG]

I make my own which I also supply to a US restorer as well, he uses it for large Portrait Graphics, their shutter curtain is about 5 foot long.

Ian

Wow that's seriously large format, really put my humble 4x5 in the shade.

I may have under-estimated the 7x5 shutter curtain may be longer. The shutter curtain of a 5x4 Speed Graphic or MPP MicroPress is about 5ft long, very simple lazy engineering compared to a British SLR Thornton Pickard Ruby Reflex shutter which has two smaller curtains and operates just like the later 35mm cloth curtained SLR shutters and is also self capping.

Ian

 

[petrochemist]

I hadn't catered for lazy engineering, I would have expected a 1 foot shutter curtain to be easily enough for any practical camera.
But my comment was at least in part regarding your 12 x 10. I've never seen anything bigger than 10 x 8 in a horizontal mounting.
I guess the vertical reprographic I used in my teens was technically a camera (only ever used for copying artwork at different magnifications so it feels more like an enlarger) the image size on that was upto ~3' square. It was in a darkroom & had no shutter the lighting being controlled for exposure. A very different beast.