The camera I've been building for a month and a half is finally done. There's still a few cosmetic things left to do, but functionally, it's complete. In honor of the original, named the Pink Panther, I hereby christen mine the Pink Cow. I'll need to paint a little logo on it somewhere :)

The Grafmatic film holder holds six sheets of 4x5" film. Today I went out and shot a full holders' worth — hopefully I'll be able to develop them tomorrow night.

The camera is actually really fun to shoot with. The rangefinder is big and bright (I didn't fully appreciate how rare that is until I tried out the several other old rangefinder cameras I now own), and the focusing mechanism is clever and fast to use. The mechanism runs along the top of the camera, and has a plastic finger-pad at each side (the gray pieces of plastic at the top of the front of the camera seen here, one of which has a white upward arrow on it). When you're holding the camera in both hands, the index finger of each hand naturally falls right on those finger pads. To focus, you just slide the whole thing left or right.

The camera is really quite portable too. It doesn't fit in your pocket or anything, but it only weighs about a pound and a half, so it can be carried around effortlessly. It's too bad I had to cut off the mounting points for the neck strap. I'll have to rig up some other way to put a strap on it, because if I could hang it from my neck, I could happy carry it around all day.

I love the Grafmatic too. It's very compact (holds six sheets in the space of about one and a half conventional film holders), and is really cleverly designed. With the Grafmatic it's easy to shoot very quickly — perfect for the newspaper reporters it was originally designed for. I wonder why anybody still bothers with traditional film holders.

Overall, I'm very happy with this camera, and am definitely glad I embarked on the project. I never expected it to take this long, but, just like when I swapped my first engine, I wasted a lot of time learning the basic techniques as I went along. I often had to stop and wait until I could go to the hardware store to buy some tool or bolt that I needed. Also, stopping to take detailed pictures of the whole process drew it out as well. If I were to make another one now, it wouldd only take a few days, and even that would be mostly due to letting epoxy cure overnight at several points. It would only take about two or three hours of actual work.

I've already got ideas in mind about possible improvements, so perhaps I will build another before too long. In the meantime, I expect to start making a lot more 4x5 negatives now that it doesn't necessarily involve dragging out the big, heavy Graflex, setting it up on the tripod, focusing carefully with a loupe, etc. Of course, I'll still do that if I want a really high quality negative and can afford the time and effort, but now I have the flexibility of not having to resort to that if I don't want to.