I am finally nearing the end of my restoration of Mitchell Standard #46, almost to the part where I have to do the dreaded final complete disassembly so the camera can be cleaned, stripped, primed, and painted. Before I get to that though, (and not at all because I don’t wanna) there are a few small mechanical issues that I didn’t have time to finish previously. While the main shutter drive and all of its bearings and gears have been redone, the automatic fade/dissolve gear train still had some major parts missing.
I was able to source the missing parts from my vast collection of scavenged Mitchell parts that I have hoarded over the years. The problem with this is, the parts for every camera are custom fit to that particular camera, so while I was able to gather the correct parts, they all had to be tediously hand fit to work with Mitchell 46. There are three major sections of the shutter drive that work together to operate the fade/dissolve mechanism. There are the fixed and variable shutter blades, both on their own shutter shafts. At the back end of the camera, is a rack and pinion gear box, for lack of a better term, that keeps the two shutters in time with the film transport, and makes it possible for the variable shutter to move in sync with the fixed shutter. The third section is a 3-speed gear box that transfers motion from the film transport to the rear rack and pinion gear box so, as you crank, you can set three different speeds for fade-in or fade-out.
Now that I’ve tried the impossible task of explaining how this thing works, I was able to get all of the bits and pieces to come together so that the automatic fade/dissolve, and the three fade-in fade-out presets all work together again. One of the seemingly simple repairs that became one of the most challenging was fitting the donor automatic fade/dissolve control knob to the camera. The challenge being that this knob was from another camera and all of the pin holes were in the wrong place and had to be reworked. Happily, I was able to finally get everything back together and was able to test the automatic fade/dissolve by hand. More to come!