35mm to Brownie Box Adapter

thingiverse

This is part of an ongoing project which aims to refit an old Agfa "Brownie Box" camera to accept standard 35mm Film. I have been tinkering around with this Idea for years now, but was stymied by the problem of loading and unloading the undeveloped film without using a dark room... Since I should have access to a 3D printer, soon, I figured it would be time to revisit this project once more in the hope of finding a solution that I could not envision using other production methods. The idea behind this design is to unspool the film from the canister it was delivered in directly into the (hopefully light-tight) 3D printed container before loading it into the brownie box. Thus, when the 35mm film is removed from the container to load into the camera, only one or two frames of film will be exposed, much like with other analog loading mechanisms... This will have the added advantage that any pictures taken will be spooled up into the 35mm canister after exposure. This is a work in progress as I have not yet had the opportunity to print the design. Also I'm still thinking about a simple method of unspooling the film from the 35mm canister into the container... Instructions untested design - will update as soon as I made the first print The Film_container.stl is just a standard 35mm film canister. I designed it to check some things... Update: I found a 35 mm film spool with sprockets on thingiverse! http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:28236 Many thanks to kellyegan for his work on that and also to mlagana for inspiring him with his http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6324. This is just great! So of course I could not rest until I had a halfway feasible mechanism ready... so here it is. You'll have to print out one of the spool.stl as well, that's the part designed by kellyegan. The spool holder has a slot in the bottom that allows you to advance the film into the container using a screwdriver... once I know if this works, I might find a more elegant solution for that. But functionality before esthetics - I have time to smooth out the design later. Still untested, but I got a good feeling about this one... The hole that's supposed to house the spool is causing some very thin walls - maybe I'll be able to make them a bit stronger once I printed it and can test how much play I still have within the brownie box housing... could be I can squeeze in a couple mm more...