My plans to paint Mitchell 46 are on hold this week due to the rain. The paint just doesn’t cure correctly when the weather is too humid. Instead, I have turned my attention to this really cool old tripod. According to the advertising I have seen, this is a Universal Panoramic and Tilting Head Tripod that was introduced by the Universal Camera Company of Chicago around 1915. The ad you see here was published 110 years ago yesterday in “The Moving Picture World”.
The tripod had obviously been stored in a garage or some place that was not climate controlled or protected from humidity. Every surface, every nut, every bolt, every screw, every gear, suffers from some amount of corrosion. Fortunately, most of it is surface level, but it meant that the pan tilt head needed to be completely taken apart.
This unit has the traditional wooden legs with steel points at the ends, clearly meant to be used in the field. The legs are attached to a heavy metal casting. The pan section is then bolted to that casting with three brass hex-head bolts, and the tilt section is separately mounted to the pan section. One of the first things I noticed was that the tilt section registers to the pan section using two dowel pins, and a bolt passes through the bottom of the tripod and pan section into the tilt section to keep all three parts together.
When I was playing with this, I noticed that the bottom of the hole that this center bolt goes through is threaded, so it seemed likely that, sometime in its life, a captured screw went through this hole so that you could easily take the tilt head off the tripod in one piece. I don’t know what the original looked like, but I made a replacement to restore this functionality.
After taking the legs off, I then pulled apart both the pan and tilt sections, cleaned for dirt, grease, and rust, and got some sections ready to be painted. The wooden legs need to be sanded, cleaned, reglued, stained and refinished, and made ready to go back on the tripod. All the brass parts that lock the legs into position needed to be ultrasonically cleaned and have some minor repairs done. The work continues.
