Any love for the Belca/Welta Belmira?

Muggins said:
I have a pre-war Welta Perle 6 x 4.5 folder - apart from an appallingly placed shutter release (seems to be a common feature on cameras of this period - though my Voigtlander Bessa has a very, very well thought out one), it's really rather nice.

They also built the deliciously mad Superfekta: http://camera-wiki.org/wiki/Superfekta
Click to expand...

That is a bonkers design but so cool! This is what I love about the old cameras, what character. :cool:
 
She's back from a CLA and I put in some film today. Not 100% convinced I loaded it correctly so I'll need to do some digging in the dark to ensure it's feeding through okay.

She's sat on the shelf at the moment, looking serene.
 
So I hadn't loaded it correctly and whilst it was definitely winding on, the film was accumulating around the spool rather than on it. Went into a dark closet and fixed it by feel and now it winds on just fine. Shot some images today but it'll probably be a few weeks before I complete the 24, send it off and get it back.

I'll update of course.
 
Well the fix was temporary and at about frame twenty it wouldn't wind on any more. So I rewound the film and decided to take the top off and have a look to see if I could diagnose the cause for the fault. The spindle wasn't rotating on every turn, in fact on most it wasn't.

I could see there was a spring around a wheel that drove the spindle. When it wanted it would connect and turn the spindle (thereby wrapping the film around the spool). It turns out there was a screw that had loosened so there was a lack of tension on the mechanism. I tightened the screw and hey presto!

So I'll have the lab develop the film and see if anything is salvageable and then run a another film through which hopefully will advance as it should.

Watch this space :)
 
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