Reveni Labs Film Cutting Guide

[wlaidlaw]

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The Combat Graflex was not a popular camera with military photographers. Firstly it is very far from small or light and secondly it must be one of the noisiest cameras ever made. When using the obligatory clockwork motor drive, it sounds like an M2 0.5" machine gun firing in the distance. The photographer might as well wave a red flag with "here I am" written on it. An ex US Navy serviceman I spoke to and who very kindly gave me the official USN service manual for the camera, said that if it jammed, you had to be very careful on disassembling as the clockwork drive was powerful enough to sever fingers. To give you an idea of the size of the beast - see below. 

Wilson

 

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[Pyrogallol]

7 hours ago, nitroplait said:

I have noticed that when an ABLON shows up from an original owner, it is often accompanied by an ABCOO. I am suspecting that the camera shops at the time pushed both items as a set.

I don't have my old Leica price list at hand, but seem to remember they were listed next to each other - at least in the Danish version.

London pricelist, Summer 1935. Ablon and Abcoo on different pages. Note the code words are not all cap’s as we usually print them?

I understand this is the only pricelist that included the “Snapshot” Leica Abfoo.

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Edited June 5, 2023 by Pyrogallol

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[wlaidlaw]

The English language convention would be to print telegraphese words in all capitals, since the telex or telegraph machines do not have upper and lower case facility. ABLON and ABCOO are ordering code telegraphese between Leica and their dealers.

As an aside, after I set up my own venture capital company in 1996, we were housed by the company in Folgate Street in Spitalfields, London, where we were in a partnership for administrative and accounting facilities. They had a large basement that was only used for old filing and archival storage. After the company chairman bought the building, he decided he was going to convert the basement into an upmarket restaurant. I went down to the basement to help with transferring the old archives to be shipped for off site storage. When we moved a rack, we found a door behind it, which nobody knew about. After a lot of searching we found a key for the room, which to our surprise contained 4 telex machines. There were many many feet of paper lying all over the floor, having spewed out of the machines, after they had been locked in the room. The building had been a motor insurance bureau for the Civil Service Motoring Association. We phoned up their successors, who discovered that up until the present (this was in the year 2000 and before the telex service was shut down in 2004), they had been paying for the connection to these machines. The most recent message we could find was in 1992, about four years after they left the building, when we presume the paper had run out. There was also reams of punched paper tape. They sent a van down from Liverpool and collected the whole lot. I wonder what they did with it. 

Wilson

[graphlex]

There is an archeological kind of stratigraphy in excavating an interest old basement.  
 

[qqphot]

5 hours ago, wlaidlaw said:

The English language convention would be to print telegraphese words in all capitals, since the telex or telegraph machines do not have upper and lower case facility. ABLON and ABCOO are ordering code telegraphese between Leica and their dealers.

As an aside, after I set up my own venture capital company in 1996, we were housed by the company in Folgate Street in Spitalfields, London, where we were in a partnership for administrative and accounting facilities. They had a large basement that was only used for old filing and archival storage. After the company chairman bought the building, he decided he was going to convert the basement into an upmarket restaurant. I went down to the basement to help with transferring the old archives to be shipped for off site storage. When we moved a rack, we found a door behind it, which nobody knew about. After a lot of searching we found a key for the room, which to our surprise contained 4 telex machines. There were many many feet of paper lying all over the floor, having spewed out of the machines, after they had been locked in the room. The building had been a motor insurance bureau for the Civil Service Motoring Association. We phoned up their successors, who discovered that up until the present (this was in the year 2000 and before the telex service was shut down in 2004), they had been paying for the connection to these machines. The most recent message we could find was in 1992, about four years after they left the building, when we presume the paper had run out. There was also reams of punched paper tape. They sent a van down from Liverpool and collected the whole lot. I wonder what they did with it. 

Wilson

Most likely to the scrap metal recyclers, I guess. There's a surprisingly large number of people who have rescued and restored machines like that, though. A few years aho my contribution to that field was manufacturing a device which allows them to communicate with modern computers via a translation adapter.  So there are at least a few people out there with teleprinters in their homes that can send and receive SMS, email, and even facebook messages.  And a few museums with slightly more interactive exhibits from the WWII era, as well.

[wlaidlaw]

9 hours ago, qqphot said:

Most likely to the scrap metal recyclers, I guess. There's a surprisingly large number of people who have rescued and restored machines like that, though. A few years aho my contribution to that field was manufacturing a device which allows them to communicate with modern computers via a translation adapter.  So there are at least a few people out there with teleprinters in their homes that can send and receive SMS, email, and even facebook messages.  And a few museums with slightly more interactive exhibits from the WWII era, as well.

I too like old office machinery. I have an Adler portable typewriter, on which my grandchildren love to write letters. I have restored a Schubert-Rastatt manual model ADM office hand cranked calculator and I have one of those amazing marvels of miniaturisation, a Curta II portable calculator. On one of the classic car rallies I used to do when my health was better, the competitive sections were known as regularity, where the navigator has to do a lot of calculation to advise the driver if he needs to speed up or slow down to maintain an exact average speed (there are hidden controls by the organisers). On one rally the navigator was not allowed to use the precision distance measuring rally navigator/average speed device that most rallies permit (Brantz International 2a like I have in my 1977 Porsche 911RSR, Halda Speed Pilot or similar), just relying on the car's own speedometer/odometer and a mechanical stop watch with no digital calculators permitted. Most folk used a slide rule for the calculations, either a standard linear one or the more accurate cylindrical type (Otis King calculator or similar). However when I was the navigator on this rally, I used a Curta II, which was not only faster than a slide rule but far more accurate. 

Wilson

[LocalHero1953]

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I enjoyed using telex machines. They were an aural soundtrack to the scattered dusty offices around the world where I worked in the 70s. There was satisfaction in getting the response that your long telex had finally been received without a line drop.

Edited June 6, 2023 by LocalHero1953

[wlaidlaw]

Paul, 

I know what you mean about the sound. An office I got seconded to for a few months in the early 80's to troubleshoot an underwriting operation, which had gone completely off the rails, had a Reuter's Teleprinter in one corner. You could always hear it idling when it was connected but not receiving and the note distinctly changed from a regular whirr whirr whirr to an irregular chakka chakka chakka when it was receiving and printing. 

Wilson

[Pyrogallol]

My father worked for a herring fishery company that exported salted herring across the world. When I went into the office with him on Saturday mornings when I was small they had a teleprinter. I still have his notebook with all the international contacts in from the 1950-60’s.

[spydrxx]

As a former naval officer I well remember the banks of teleprinters in my division, and all of them also produced the perforated paper tapes corresponding to the printed text. It is pretty hard to forget the sounds of those things revving up as they prepared to receive traffic😁

[qqphot]

5 hours ago, spydrxx said:

As a former naval officer I well remember the banks of teleprinters in my division, and all of them also produced the perforated paper tapes corresponding to the printed text. It is pretty hard to forget the sounds of those things revving up as they prepared to receive traffic😁

Maybe this will trigger some memories:

 

A collector's group was demonstrating a crypto machine in conjunction with radioteletype, and I set up a machine to receive and print. There are a number of videos of the tape perforators in operation too, I don't want to go even further off-topic on this thread.  

Edited June 6, 2023 by qqphot

[spydrxx]

3 hours ago, qqphot said:

Maybe this will trigger some memories:

 

A collector's group was demonstrating a crypto machine in conjunction with radioteletype, 

Remember those too...no further comments...still bound by various laws. Lots of info out there on the web though, as well as several books.

[qqphot]

2 hours ago, spydrxx said:

Remember those too...no further comments...still bound by various laws. Lots of info out there on the web though, as well as several books.

Nothing secret here - this is an M209 encoding with a key shared on the group's website; the goal was to receive the transmission and successfully decode it using software that emulated the actual M209 it was encoded with. A pretty neat project, really!  They were enthusiastic their message had been received and printed on a machine appropriate to the time period!

[Nigel Craig]

I ordered the Reveni device but it is not very accurate as it would lead one to cut across the sprocket holes. The sole occasion I have used I had to recut the curve and adjust the length counting to 22.

[nitroplait]

5 hours ago, Nigel Craig said:

I ordered the Reveni device but it is not very accurate as it would lead one to cut across the sprocket holes. The sole occasion I have used I had to recut the curve and adjust the length counting to 22.

Bummer! That defies the purpose.

I just revisited their homepage and noticed that one of their product shots actually shows them cutting across the perforation!

How about that?

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[madNbad]

On 7/12/2023 at 10:13 PM, Nigel Craig said:

I ordered the Reveni device but it is not very accurate as it would lead one to cut across the sprocket holes. The sole occasion I have used I had to recut the curve and adjust the length counting to 22.

Send an email to Matt Bechberger, founder of Reveni Labs and explain the problem. He responds to input and wants to know if there are adjustments that could be made.