Any love for the Belca/Welta Belmira?

[moggi1964]

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

That is a bonkers design but so cool! This is what I love about the old cameras, what character. 😎

 

[moggi1964]

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.

 

[moggi1964]

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.

 

[moggi1964]

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 🙂