Wayde,
I remember my father, an inventor with ca 25 patents in several countries,
once saying to me - you will never replace bellows with someting else...
it's so old and yet the best. Me too, I tried with balloons... no way! The
best I made were telescopic antennas in the corners of the standards,
covered with black plastic. It worked surprisingly well, very elastic ...
but what advantage it gave in comparison to bellows?? It was havier, of
course, (because of the metal in it) and bulkier because of the irregular
folding of the plastic...
The reason, why bellows is the best solution is simple - it best imitates
the nature! Look at your wrist, the skin folding when you move it - and you
understand. You will never replace bellows with something else... George
- Original Message -
From: J. Wayde Allen [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wednesday, November 14, 2001 10:40 PM
Subject: Re: [Cameramakers] Idea for bellows support
On Tue, 13 Nov 2001, TSHACK wrote:
I've been brainstorming on what I can use as an alternative to a folded
bellows structure.
I think that there may be several interesting possibilities. I was
talking with a fellow sometime back who supposedly knew one of the members
of the Deardorf familly, and claimed that they had figured out a way to
work pleats inside of pleats. This allowed for good bellows movements in
a compressed state while still allowing for relatively long bellows
extension. I wasn't able to get any more details, but it sounded like a
sort of combination between a bag bellows with a compressible pleated
section.
Nothing saying that you have to use square or rectangular bellows (tapered
or not). There are always the bellows folds used for the construction of
concertinas for instance
http://www.concertinas.com/herrington_bros.htm#Bellows. That would give
you something akin to a round or hexagonal bellows design.
One idea I had was to use these little retractable keychains, or id card
holders. The little plastic ones that have a somewhat strong return.
That is pretty clever! The one thing that comes to mind here would be
that the material has to go somewhere as the structure collapes. This
might be prone to the material clumping up.
A variation on this idea would be to make the side stiffeners using a
piece of spring steel (piano wire or maybe those metal bands used to close
boxes). If you designed the structure so that the spring wall stiffener
curves away from the center of the bellows it would compress and push the
fabric out at the same time.
Hmmm ... the guys talking about pressurizing their camera chambers could
simply let the air push the bellows material out. It'd be kind of like
smushing a balloon.
One could build a series of telescoping boxes or tubes in place of a
bellows ...
There are probably several other possibilities. Those are just what comes
to mind as I'm typing.
- Wayde
([EMAIL PROTECTED])
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