Mar 22, 2011

A naked Kodak in the making & other stuff

There is a very worn Flexo box camera for sale at eBay right now. The leather is mostly gone. Nevertheless the camera has received one bid, and I know from whom. No, not me. I predict it will be reïncarnated as a museum quality naked Flexo and be sold for about ten times the amount it will fetch in a few days.
We will see.

The wood and brass group is a very nice community of antique camera lovers, with a number of veterans in it. During the past days I learned that there are at least two other 2 digit serial number specimens known of the No. 4 Folding Kodak, next to my no. 77, one with number 68 and the other with number 82. Some of the very low number specimens have no wheel on top (for winding on the fim) and others do. Maybe some cameras were updated with a wheel at a later date by their owners. We know that the Eastman Co. did advertise the updating of their cameras in case of the use of plate holders.
In one of my messages for the group I mentioned the Victor Moyes list. Half an hour later I received a mail from Michael Pritchard, yes THE Michael Pritchard, to tell a bit more about this list because it sounded interesting. It is interesting! Victor Moyes was a director of the patent museum of Eastman Kodak Co. and in 1921 he typed a list of all production numbers of Eastman / Kodak cameras. The records he based this list on do not exist anymore. In his lists he gives an overview per camera model of size, date when a batch was ordered and numbers that were ordered.
In the group I proposed that we put together all the pieces of this list we can lay hands on and share it. We will see what happens.

Last but not least, there is a Boston Bulls Eye for sale at eBay. It is a wooden version that still looks very nice. Fault is that it has two extra holes in the back and that the seller wants to sell it for too much money. Again, let us see what happens.

1 comment:

  1. there are several average quality bulleyes on ebay and afew 1896 examples of Eastman cameras but of course WAAYYY out of my price range and I like to actually use my cameras....

    ReplyDelete