How to unscrew a stuck lens element.....????

Recently i bought myself a beautiful Dallmeyer 3a!
It's in beautiful original shape.
But there was one problem. All the lens elements were stuck.
Also the soft focus function.

As i have tried this solution before on a Hermagis with a severe stuck rear element i gave it a try again, but now with this beauty.

All you need is a fitting piece of thin rubber, a screwdriver, a LITTLE hammer and a large hose clamp.
Cut the rubber just as wide as the clamp itself. Make sure you cut it a little shorter to keep the place open where the screw is.
This to make sure you get an equal pressure around the element.
Tighten the hose clamp slightly. There is no need to tighten it hard! When you tighten it to hard you might break the glass!!!
After that you take a small hammer and gently tap on the screw in the direction the element has to go loose.

Before this solution i have tried several options. I tried silicon spray several times over a few days, tried to unscrew it while wearing special rubber gloves.

Nothing worked. Now it came loose within 2 seconds.

rare find

Yesterday we participated at the fotografica fair at Doesburg.
Doesburg is a small and very old city in Holland which became a city already in 1237 !
Every year Roel Fokken organizes the open air Fotografica fair.
It's one of the largest open air fair. Even bigger than Bievres.

More than 160 stalls filled with fotografica.
We (Henk a good frend of mine and myself) were there to promote Collodion photography.

At the start we suffered from very heavy rain but at 09:30 the weather changed and we had beautiful open weather. So we had a great day explaning the proces over and over....

Last year i spoke to someone about a very special ambrotype and he promised me, if he would find one, he would bring it for me.

And he did !
Now i am the owner of a very rare ambrotype. Just have a look at the pictures.

I am extremely glad with this one as it gives me the possibility to explain the process to people who have never heard of wet plate photography.
You can open it like a book and you can look at the ambrotype at both sides.
Without one of the 2 backgrounds its transparent, but when you close one side you can see the whole plate as it should look like.

Finally.......................

Finally i was able to move my "new" dark room sink up to my studio.
I bought it, but it turned out to be too big to bring it up using the staircases.
( my studio is at my attic and also my dark room).

First i had to cut of the top. But with the right tools that wasn't such a big job.
Using a ladder we were able to get it in trough our bedroom window.
Just one staircase to go, but with just a small damage at the staircase we finally made it !!

Now i have to break down my old sink and replace it.
I hope starting to make 20 x 20 inch plates soon.

stay tuned....

Silver bath maintenance

Recently I noticed some problems with one of my silver bath solution.
While developing plates it was more difficult to spread the developer over the plates.
Of course you can solve it by adding a little alcohol to your developer but on a certain point that won't help anymore

So it was time to start maintenance of my silver bath.
I didn't had any other problems so  I decided just to boil the solution back to a volume of about 90%. As a matter of fact, just heating up the Silver Nitrate is even more than enough. You only need to get rid of the Alcohol and Ether which came in with the Collodion.
Alcohol already boils at 79 degrees Celcius and Ether already at 35 degrees Celsius.
make sure you boil the silver solution in a stainless steel pot and in a very well ventilated room or outside.
After doing this I add the needed volume demineralised water and the bath CAN turn VERY cloudy.
Don't worry about that. It's absolutely normal and has nothing to do with maybe a bad quality of Demi water.
Just shake the bottle and leave it that way for a few hours it will clear and you will see a lot of dirt at the bottom of the bottle.

After that I sunned the bath under a face tanner. filtered it twice, checked gravity, added the needed silver nitrate and it was ready for use again.

Result : a perfectly clear and good working silver bath again.
So it takes a few hours but the result is worth it.
There is NO need to iodise your Silber nitrate again. It's ready for use

NOTE: I have been working with the "same" silver nitrate bath from the start in 2009. I NEVER added anything except silver nitrate and water. So No acid, no Clay no NOTHING.
If you treat your Silver nitrate with care you can work with it for many years!

 

After adding Demi water the solution can turn cloudy. Don't panic.
This is absolutely normal

 Lot's of dirt after the first filtering

 Gravity is too low. Should be around 1.08

Added extra Silver nitrate untill it reached the exact gravity and it's ready for use again