First restoration project

The camera I used to take the picture I posted a little while ago it was in a deplorable condition. Chipped paint, oxidate and dirty metal components, moldy & ruptured bellows "fixed" with electrical tape, etc. While it was sort of usable, it bothered me (and I'm not obsessive-compulsive about cleanness and order).

Since I had a brand new workshop available to me, I took the whole thing apart and :

* stripped all the paint from all the wooden parts
* sanded and polished most of the metal parts
* sanded, treated, stained & coated the wooden parts
* fixed the broken bellow edges with textile band and painted it with flexible rubber paint (we'll see how well that holds up).
* put it all back together

Sounds simple, right? That's what I thought when I started, but it turns out, there was a lot more work that I expected. But it's more or less completed now. There are some things I might do in the future, like plate all the non-brass metal with brass and polish it (why they used mixed metals is beyond my ability to understand), refinish the wooden parts to get a smoother surface, make a new bellows, but for now, I will use it as it is. Here it is, with pictures (you can click on the picture for a bigger, more detailed image) before and after.

By the way, for the younger generation, yes, this is a camera, it uses something called "film" to record the image and there are good reasons to use such a camera ;) To give you just one of them which is easier to explain, when properly used, the camera can produce an image with detail equivalent with a 200 mega-pixel camera.