Speed knob winding

[Gordon Coale]

I've grown quite fond of knob winders. In fact, I've grown to prefer them to lever winders. Mechanically they are simpler. That is a good thing. A well adjusted and lubed knob winder doesn't take much effort. I think the biggest hurdle to using knob winders is the perceived slowness of use. A wrong perception.

I developed a techinque for speed knob winding. I put the knob in the space between my thumb and finger. (See first picture.) Pressing the knob with the side of my finger I pull the finger back. It completes the wind before it reaches the end of the finger. (See second picture.) Reach over, press the shutter, and go back to step 1. I can get off 10 exposures in about 15 seconds. This might not work with short fingers. Try it. How many shots can you get off with lever winders?

 

[ChrisN]

You'll get calluses in strange places...

 

[simonankor]

I tend to shoot, drop the camera from my eye and grab the knob with my left hand, twist it all the way round in one go, raise and shoot again. I can get off a couple of shots a second like that, but it hurts your wrist if you try to go through a whole roll that fast! 😉😉

PS I LOVE my FED 1!

 

[hugivza]

I tend to hold and rotate the knob with my right whilst contrarotating the body with my left. It works!

 

[Kin Lau]

Only my Fed 2 has a large enough knob and is smooth enough for that. My Leica IIIa's knob is too small for this and the other Kievs and Zorkis would tear the skin off my finger if I tried to do that.

 

[payasam]

I recall seeing, in a magazine in the early 1960s, a ratcheted thingamajig which fitted over the knob of a screw mount Leica and gave a lever advance. Must have been anchored to the body in some way. One of those miracle inventions which turned, for good reason, into nitrogen. Maybe helium.

 

[Pherdinand]

knob wind on my super ikonta is really slow. But on the contax or kiev, it is not.

 

[KoNickon]

Knob wind is fine. Knob rewind is not! (Why didn't the manufacturers make larger diameter rewind knobs? It'd save a lot of time (and wear and tear on my fingers).

 

[Pherdinand]

Tear on your fingers yes, but not time, i'd say. Without gears involved, a small-diameter rewind knob works faster than a large one: you can roll it "lomger" between your two fingers if the diameter is small. That is, you can do two revolutions with small diam knob, while only one with a large one.
Does it make sense?🙂

 

[Gordon Coale]

Somehow the pictures to illustrate knob speedwinding evaporated from the original post. Probably with all the recent moves. I put them back up.