OK, a couple of months without a post and of course the camera is completed now. To be honest there wasn't a whole lot of "woodworking" to be done after assembling the front and back frames, Instead, the project was all about fabricating parts in wood, metal, and fabric.
The lens boards were made after the frames were completed. I have one lens, with a sort of odd-ball 33mm diameter shutter. I cut the hole in the lens board to the right there just freehand with a knife, and sanded it smooth. These lens boards are just two pieces of 2mm birchplywood laminated to provide a lip. The walnut veneer was added for aesthetic reasons. All the gluing was done with some contact cement I bought in France to repair some shoes once.
Arguably the most challenging part of this build was making the bellows. There are plenty of resources online for assisting with this process, Google is your friend. The construction is a sandwich of a thin, coated nylon, card stock, and bookbinder cloth, and should be completely light-tight as well as fold flat. I sketched the bellows on my phone's CAD program, printed out at full scale, and made a model first to get the size right.
The assembled materials and tools for this day-long job. My daughter helped on a professional day when she was staying home from school. Here we've started gluing the card slats on the nylon.
The fourth side must be glued on a sort of ironing-board we fabricated from a parquet flooring offcut from a building site. After this step, the bookbinder's fabric was glued on, with the seam on the opposite side. Then the whole construction was turned inside-out and birch plywood frames were glued to the ends.
The front standards being fabricated from aluminum bar stock. I drilled a bunch of holes, and filed them flat.
Basically all the parts, just waiting for some screws.
The completed camera, on Easter.
One of the first shots, of my daughter and her friend. Old Arista ortho-lith film processed in Polymax.
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