Wirgin Deluxe Model 51, Wollensak Velostigmat 75/4.5 lens

[lohrentz]

I picked this up yesterday for $25. There is no camera logo or name on the external part of the camera. Inside it says Camera Specialty Company, Inc, NYC. The seller called it a "Wollensack Vintage Camera", didn't bother to clean it, and had low grade photos that made it look much worse than it is. It came from a cabin up north in Wisconsin that someone purchased. Seemed to have been well taken care of for most of its life, but was dusty on top of the bellows and had a dead spider underneath, so it seems to have been on display with the bellows open in the recent past. The glass appears to be clean, the aperture works, the shutter fires when I attach a cable to it, and the focus ring is smooth. When I hold the shutter open on bulb mode and look through the lens, with the back removed, it seems to focus about an inch in front of the lens, regardless of where the focus ring is. Is that normal? Anything I should know about maintenance of of the bellows? Does it make sense to run a roll of film through it, and is there anything I should do first?

 

[lohrentz]

Welp, I just now noticed that crack on the front.

 

[Mos6502]

When I hold the shutter open on bulb mode and look through the lens, with the back removed, it seems to focus about an inch in front of the lens, regardless of where the focus ring is. Is that normal?

You're going to have to clarify what you mean by this. But if you're just looking through the lens from the back, and expecting to see an in-focus image through the lens, that's not really how optics work. You'd need to put a ground glass across the film gate to check focus.

As for the camera, I believe these were made during or just after WWII? The Wirgin brothers were both in the camera business. Henry Wirgin in Germany, and his brother (Harry? I've forgot) in New York. Wirgin made cameras in Germany, and sold them in the U.S. However because of the whole Nazi thing, Wirgin left the German factory for his own safety, and some cameras were produced in the U.S. in the meantime, including these folding cameras. They're not terrible, but they definitely not up to the standards of the company's German made products.

 

[Ambro51]

Hmmmm...sounds odd about the lens, best quick check is laying a ground glass (or thin paper or wax paper) across the film opening and see what focuses on that. Could be... possibly....the lens is missing an element? It’s a Cooke Triplet, with two convex lenses with a concave between them.

 

[lohrentz]

I'm running a roll of Arista Edu through it to see what I've got.

 

[lohrentz]

Well it works. The focus is about 10% nearer than the indicator on the focus knob. The shutter works at various speeds.

Fomapan 100 at EI400, XTOL 1:1 minimal agitation

Was testing the focus so I shot this wide open.