New for the week of 1/11/22
New to the site this week are a variety of prime lenses from brands like Kinoptik, Cooke, Bausch & Lomb, and Astro Berlin. More lenses to come!
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35mm
Fox Freehead Restoration Complete!
Happy new year everyone! A brief progress report on the Freehead for this first Friday of the new year: It’s as finished as I have time to work on it. Because this project is so interesting, it has gone way over the time I had set aside to finish it. There is still some air
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A Final 2021 Update on the Fox Freehead
One final check in before we take a few days off for the holidays. The Fox Freehead is now about 90% repaired. I have been working on the frozen tilt axis for the last week; it is another remarkable piece of engineering. The tilt axis is made up of a two-part casting that houses the
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Cinerama Slate
I wanted to share one more truly amazing item from John Hora’s collection before the end of the year. John was involved in a project in 2012, along with fellow cinematographer Douglas Knapp and director David Strohmaier, filming a three-panel Cinerama travelog about Los Angeles in the original Cinerama style. Additionally John was part of
Another Step Forward for the Fox Freehead
Success! Thanks to the folks at Jim’s Tap Extraction Service in Torrance, CA, the broken hardened screws were EDMed out of the casting of the Fox Freehead! Also, at the 11th hour yesterday, the grease I was recommended finally arrived. In the meantime, I went on a search to see if the original ¼-20 fillister
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Good Grease Hunting
I hope everyone had a lovely Thanksgiving holiday, ours was nice and restful. Now that we’re back, I have spent the week hunting everywhere for a suitable replacement grease to finish my work on the Freehead. According to the camera manual, the original grease used in the hydraulic damper for the Freehead was water pump
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A Quick Update on the Fox Freehead Before Thanksgiving
Just a quick update on the progress on the Fox Freehead before we break for Thanksgiving. I have spent most of the week up to my elbows in various types of grease, trying to clean all of the orifices and metering valves that control the drag on the pan axis. This is proving to be
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Searching for a History of Kinoptik
As with all of the wonderful things we offer, we try to include as much of their history as we can discover. We have run into a roadblock on researching the history of the Kinoptik lenses we recently added to our website. We have found very little information about the company itself, its founders, and
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Machining a new handle for the Fox Freehead Camera Mount
Still not having much success getting the 80-year-old screws out of the Fox Freehead, and to avoid that frustrating task, I turned instead to replacing the missing telescoping pan tilt handle. I spent a long time studying the bad black and white photographs in the Fox Camera manual, and they showed two possibilities for the
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Powering the Fox Cine Simplex Camera
As I am feverishly trying to bring the Fox camera back to shooting condition, a few items remain unfinished. The pan tilt head is stalled while I try to remove the rest of the stubborn screws, wait for rubber hand grips to arrive, and as I machine the pan handle extension locking lever. I have
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