On Mitchell Standards and some early GCs, you could order an option that had a series of gear boxes that would do automatic fade-in/fade-out over a selected number of frames. Mitchell 46 at one time had this option, but the kind folks who tried to reflex it ripped out most of it and disposed of
Time for a little more work on Mitchell 46 Read More »
Recently, I was contacted by my friend and fellow vintage camera enthusiast Michael Geiger, who had recently acquired Mitchell Standard #125. This camera, like Mitchell 46, had been abused in its previous life. Mitchell 125 was hacked into an animation camera, and whoever did the conversion, removed and discarded most of the original shutter control
A Face-lift for Mitchell Standard 125 Read More »
With many of the significant hurdles overcome, it was finally time to rough assemble Mitchell 46, put a hand crank on it, and hope that all my work would pay off. Mitchell Standard and GC cameras rely on three gears to control the overall camera timing. These gears keep the film that is being fed
Hand-Cranked for the First Time in Decades: Mitchell 46 Read More »
After winning last week’s struggle with the rear bearing race, I could actually move on to properly aligning the shutter in the camera casting. I hope you will all forgive the tedious details of this process, but it seemed important to me to outline the many steps it took to achieve this. Several things had
The Long and Winding Road to a Balanced Shutter in Mitchell 46 Read More »
First off, I want to thank everyone for all of the wonderful suggestions they made. All of them were quite good and helpful. Before I had read your suggestions however, I went at this problem with a thread file, honing stones, and lapping compound. After several hours of work, I was able to get the
The Shutter Shutters Again! (Sort Of…) Read More »
Why is it that the jobs that are supposed to be the simplest always turn out to be the most complicated? Thinking that the most labor-intensive part of the restoration of Mitchell 46 was behind me now, I was supposed to be at the point where I reassemble the working components of the camera, set
One More Problem on the Way to Success Read More »
I thought everyone might appreciate a short video of Mitchell Standard #46 racking over for the first time in decades. This 6 seconds of video represents 5 months of hard work that has finally paid off.
Mitchell 46 Racks Over at Last! Read More »
True to my word, I struggled through the myriad of steps needed to get Mitchell 46 back onto its rackover L-base this week. On its surface, this sounds like a simple process, but without the various fixtures that the Mitchell factory had to complete this, the process becomes complicated. Mechanically, the rackover L-base is a
Victory Over the Rackover L-Base! Read More »
I had to take a break from work on Mitchell 46 for a few days this week to do some rearranging of my machine shop. A friend has offered me his CNC milling machine, and in order to fit it into the shop, I had to sell my venerable Webb milling machine. The logistics behind
Making Room for New Machinery Read More »
Somehow we find ourselves in July already (not sure how that happened!), so we decided to take a couple of days off for the 4th of July holiday and relax. Now though, we are back to work on Mitchell 46, along with the dozen other projects we have going at the same time. Much to
