stanoli
The bellows on my old Graflex 4x5 were worn at the corner folds.
As I couldn’t find anything useful online—or only ridiculously expensive repair kits—apart from replacing the bellows, I proceeded as follows:
Carefully remove the bellows (a bit tricky, so proceed gently and check carefully beforehand how it was fitted!)
Stretch the bellows from the inside (using wooden slats and a small screw clamp, corner by corner)
Mark the zigzag fold with a black marker.
Carefully brush the fold with a diluted rubber solution (bicycle repair kit, lighter fluid, CAUTION: HIGHLY FLAMMABLE) using a small brush.
Leave to dry for 1 day.
Mark the zigzag fold again with the permanent marker.
Reinforce the zigzag fold lengthways with black nylon repair tape from a sports (stunt) kite shop (5 cm wide, 10 m long, approx. 20
cfb_de
"Vorwerk Certoplast" in black is flexible, light-proof and relatively inexpensive. Bonding it with THF is also relatively straightforward. However, inhaling it during the bonding process is guaranteed to cause cancer.
Advantages: The stuff is flexible PVC. It’s easy to process.
Disadvantages: The stuff is PVC and any professional environmentalist would immediately have a fit. The necessary THF is not readily available. I wonder why?
When weighing up the pros and cons for the customer, repair shops resort to traditional bonding methods, if necessary at the expense of their own health.
Such firms apply a great deal of craftsmanship to the standard optical bellows used by spectroscopists in science, research and nuclear power. And, if necessary, they would use special adhesive polymers produced by hard X-rays. A very peaceful application of gamma radiation. Completely without THF, purely radioactive: they even listen to the radio whilst working next to the fully radiation-shielded booth.
Process engineering is a marvellous thing: hardly any customer knows how their Teflon pan is actually coated.
Hardly any customer knows how the cattle in their films fart, shit and die in the fields purely for the extraction of Kodak gelatin (Kodak is the only producer of specified gelatin worldwide).
Hardly any customer knows that approx. 3,000 litres of drinking water are destroyed per digital sensor, resulting in the direct death of around 100 people every day.
I’ve based this on 30 litres of drinking water per person per day. In total. They then get about <0.5 litres for drinking and eating themselves. The residue ends up in the semiconductor factory. The laptop then bears a ‘green electronics’ label.
These figures can be verified at any time by the UN. That is why I have cited them.
Drinking water is the real problem in the world. And it is precisely this resource that we are blocking, on the one hand through our advances in semiconductors, and on the other through our ‘environmental awareness’: We push water-intensive production far away from us, tinker with tax-advantaged solar cells here thanks to sufficient clean water under subsidised conditions, and then complain about emissions in our country, even though we have already shifted 99% of them to the other side of the world over the last ten years.
Only we Germans are that stupid. Actually, with this policy (unfortunately supported by *all* parties, including and especially the policy of shifting environmental risks caused by the “Greens”), we are real arseholes towards the world’s population.
I won’t talk about CO₂. That is a short-term issue that will be won by the more technologically advanced nations.
Best regards,
Franz
