I have an amazing archive of old, unrestored tripods from many different eras that have been sitting, waiting their turn to be joined with the right camera. When the clean-up of the Pathé Professional camera was complete, this tripod seemed like a match made in movie heaven. I rescued this Motion Picture Apparatus Co. tripod from a damp basement in Chicago, and it sat around, wrapped in bubble wrap and brown paper, for a long time. But now it has been disassembled, cleaned up, and had new parts made for those that were missing.
To accomplish this, the wooden legs were very lightly sanded and steel wooled, stabilized, and treated with linseed oil. The brass pieces were cleaned and all corrosion was removed, protecting the patina as much as possible. All the threads on the threaded parts were refreshed, a new ⅜-16 tie-down screw had to be designed and machined, and the two hand cranks were repaired.
The most difficult repair was on the drive shaft that operates the pan axis. This drive shaft was seriously bent, probably from a fall, so that whole mechanism had to be reworked. I removed the pan axis drive shaft, put it between centers on the lathe, and straightened it as much as possible. It wasn’t possible to straighten the drive shaft enough to work smoothly, so I cut off part of the shaft, machined the base end of it to a smaller diameter, machined a new drive shaft end with the correct dimensions and key features, press-fit the new drive shaft end onto the old drive shaft, and then reinstalled everything into the pan housing. All works smoothly now.
The hand crank for that axis arrived here in two pieces, with the screw that held the wooden portion of the handle sheared off and the remaining threaded piece trapped in the metal section. I removed the trapped threaded piece, machined a new screw that matched the original screw, put everything back together, and cleaned everything up. Now the pan and tilt axes are back in action.
The last thing on this project was to replace the missing tie-down screw that holds a camera to the top plate. I couldn’t find any reference material that showed what the original tie-down looked like, so I just made one that made sense to me. I think the tripod turned out great and shall be a good match for the Pathé.
