Recently, my friend and long-time client Ben Ziryab asked if I could diagnose a rough spot in the drive of this Fries Engineering-built VistaVision camera. This camera is based on a Mitchell VistaVision movement that has been installed in a custom Fries camera body with custom electronics. When this camera arrived, it had a profound rough spot that you could feel when you inched the camera by hand. When the camera was run, the electronics would show a fault, that the camera was in a stall condition, so all the bells and whistles would go off. Getting into the mechanics of this camera was complicated because most of the electronics are mounted to the baseplate of the camera, and none of the leads were long enough to simply let me lay the baseplate to one side.
To combat this, I employed a Sharpie to mark all the connectors, before carefully stripping all of the electronics out of the camera. I am still not sure exactly what the problem is, but it seems to be in the section of the camera that supports the focal plane shutter and mirrored shutter assemblies. This assembly is bolted and dowel pinned to the main camera housing in 4 places and bridges the area that the mirrored shutter travels through. The trouble seems to be that this bridge assembly can flex ever so slightly as the two shutters go through their rotations. That seems to be causing a bind when the two shutters are between the shooting and the capping positions. I’m not sure what the fix is yet, but I’m sure I’ll think of something. I will be gone for a couple days next week to celebrate my youngest daughter’s graduation from law school, so I likely won’t have a follow-up to this for a couple of weeks. Hope you’ll follow along!