Leica I Camera Kaleidoscope

thingiverse

## What is it? I made this model of a Leica I as wedding present for a friend of mine who really likes vintage cameras and optics. The camera is designed to contain a kaleidoscope, which is hidden in the lens and can be looked through from the back of the camera. I used images of the Leica I as reference and freehanded the proportions. The huge lens is needed to fit the kaleidoscope. ## What is a Kaleidoscope? A Kaleidoscope is basically a tube that is filled with 3 mirrors. So when you look through it you see reflections of reflections reflected in reflections. At the end of the tube there are some colorful glass pearls or marbles which create a colorful mandala-like pattern that changes when you shake the thing. __Imortant:__ I used the "Betzold 52120" kaleidoscope (image with the cardboard roll), which I bought from [Amazon](https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B06XYHPVZ2/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1) The model is designed to tightly fit this particular kaleidoscope. The design will not work with another one. ## How do you make it? I posted some images of my buildplate to show how I printed the model. I split the lens in the slicer to minimize the amount of support needed for printing and to ensure a clean result. After gluing together the lens the Kaleidoscope can be pushed in from the front and the entire lens can then be glued into the camera. ## Why is the main camera model not given as .stl file? It is, however it is compressed in the .zip file. The leather structure of the camera body looks extremely cool, however it requires a high resolution mesh, which results in a 281MB stl file. Thingiverse does not allow such large files. I therefore compressed it in a .zip file to 191MB. ## How was the model painted I painted the camera by hand with Vallejo Game Colors from the "Vallejo color case 72172", most notably the "Brassy Brass" and "Charred Brown". For the last touch I used washes to give the camera a slightly dirtier look: "Warpaints: Quickshade Wäschen Set" by Army Painter. Most images were taken while the color was still wet. The one image with the camera on the orange box shows the final dried finish. ## Why are the files named incorrectly? When I started the project I thought the camera is the Leica II, not the Leica I - I also had no Idea how to correclty write Leica. I realized that I never changed the filenames after uploading the files, and I don't care enought to reupload ;-) ## Can I have the blender file? Sure drop me a comment and I'll upload it. The blender file contains all individual components and the final mesh that was booled together. I didn't upload it because it is a bit of a mess, about 1GB in size and I didn't think anyone would care about it.