|
The Project
Having recently purchased a Taxiphote
viewer, I was soon thinking how I might view my own slides in this
wonderful machine. My Taxiphote is the version with 107mm x
44mm mounts
Figure 1.
First, I modified a few RBT mounts by
adding small strips of 1mm thick card to each end of the RBT mount
Figure 2.
The card that I used was a high density
material obtained from my local craft shop. I guess that the
plastic sheet used by modellers would also serve the purpose.
I used brush applied 'Super Glue' to attach the strips to the RBT
mount.
It should be noted that RBT mounts vary
slightly in thickness and so you should try a stack of 25 mounts
in the magazine before carrying out the modification modification.
Next it occurred to me that it would be
interesting to try producing slides in the format intended for
the Taxiphote - not in glass but using ink-jet printable
transparency film, the sort used for overhead projectors. I have
tried two different ink-jet printers and various transparency
films. The best results were achieved using Permajet OHP
Transfer Film, www.permajet.com
produced for making contact negatives
Figure 3.
The results were reasonable but wouldn't really stand up to the
high level of magnification of my Taxiphote - My machine has
additional lenses brought into play by a lever on the left hand
side (not on every model). The film slide was to thin to be
handled by the Taxiphote transport mechanism and so was placed
alongside a glass slide with emulsion removed for the experiment.
More work is needed here!
As an aside, a useful modification to the
Taxiphote is to fix a light box to the back of the cabinet thereby
avoiding the need to situate the machine in front of a window.
I bought my lightbox from a local camera shop and attached it with
Velcro to avoid damaging the cabinet.
Barry Aldous, Updated
October 2008.
Any questions? Please contact
barry@aldous.net
MORE TO FOLLOW
|
