I had a break in my schedule this week to focus on the wooden Pathé hand crank camera I introduced last October. I have been looking forward to working on this camera since it arrived in the shop. When the Pathé got here, it was in very nice condition, with only a few minor problems that needed to be addressed. Most notably, it didn’t have any magazines. I owe a very big thanks to my friend Michael Madden who helped me acquire this set from Steve Gainer. And I owe Steve a big thanks for working with me on the price. I was surprised to find this 110+ year old camera cranked relatively smoothly right out of the carrying case it sat in for who knows how long. For the past few days, I have been cleaning the many brass pieces that leave behind that lovely green, gooey oxidation, oiling all of the cams and moving bits, and lightly greasing the gears. Because I didn’t want to disassemble the camera unnecessarily, the most difficult thing was getting to all the gears, bearings, and cams through the wooden housing. That being accomplished, I was able to crank the camera and was even further amazed at how smooth this camera runs.
The next step is to run the camera with film, but before I could do that, I needed to check over the magazines and make a new magazine take-up belt. I pulled a piece of leather belting out of stock, fit it to the camera and magazines, trimmed the belt to size with my trusty old leather belt block, drilled the appropriate holes for the metal belt connector, and voila! Camera and magazine are now working together!
The last thing I had time to do this week was to look over the little sidefinder. There were a few places where the brass sheet metal had come free from the main body, so those areas were repaired, the lens was cleaned, and everything was put back together. It looks to me like there is a ground glass missing from the sidefinder, but I am not sure what that looks like just yet. That’s all for now, but I hope to show the camera running film next week.
