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Oatmeal Box Pinhole Photography by Stewart L. Woodruff..............

K

Kelley (Texas)

New member
I saw this article on the Internet and figured that some of you folks might be interested in making a Pinhole Camera this winter when you can not get outside due to the weather. The subject of Pinhole Photography is interesting and you will enjoy reading about it. You might even consider sharing this with a grandchild that may need a science project for school...something you could do together. Please have a great day! Kelley (Texas) :)

http://users.rcn.com/stewoody/
 
n/t
 
in school. Think it was a science project back then and we could do a pin hole camera, a crystal radio with cats whisker and another radio with a toilet paper tube wrapped with copper wire and shellacked. All of them were fun projects that still remain in embedded in this work out brain of mine. Thanks for the trip down memory lane. Geo
 
a crystal radio with cats whisker. It was a little difficult at times to find a radio station on that little silver colored crystal rock, but it worked great once a radio station was located. I listened to it late at night after I went to bed, used the bed spring for an antenna. I still have that old radio in a box in the closet. Kelley (Texas) :)
 
would you please send a few pictures? I think that it would be a neat project. Kelley (Texas) :)
 
n/t
 
my radio bench. Here is one like the one I have. I used to make them for the neighbor hood kids while my kids were growing up only I used a 1n34 germanium diode. They are cheap, Less than a dollar. I still have some around here. If you type in 1n34 diode radio in google, you will find all kinds of info on making them. They have gone high tech now with a variable tuner etc. They also make a 1n27 diode they claim is even better. Radio shack usually has a small pack of them for sale cheap. But not the fun we had trying to find the hot spot with the old cats whiskers. I too would lay under the covers and listen to a country radio station in New London, Ct called WNLC. Its still on the air. The old ones on wood or later bakalite are really pretty neat. Again, stimulates those old memories that I really cherish.

George-CT
 
you posted. I just tore half the closet apart looking for it, would have finished looking tonight but Debbie came into the study to see what all the commotion was about...one look at the pile of stuff on the floor and I was in deep trouble. I guess that I could have been a little neater and put the stuff in a neat stack rather than a big pile. I am just going to push the pile over into the corner and wait til morning to put it back in the closet.

Later on, I built a 10 meter CW transciever from a kit that my father bought me. We used a copper wire outside for the antenna. The radio worked and I bought a book and tape and started learning code. However, about this time I went to work for Mr. Baker at his horse business and that ended the radio hobby. I had worked for Mr. Baker before, but it was only swapping out cleaning stalls for riding time, no pay was involved. Now he had hired me for actual pay and told me that he would teach me how to train horses too! I was in hog heaven. Kelley (Texas) :)
 
some of my belongings got left behind in the moves. Some forgotten in attics, crawl spaces, garages etc. Or my kids found them and used them up. Some I have replace along the way via yard sales or Ebay finds.

I know the CW hobby well. Back then your radio kit may have been Heathkit, Eico, Layfette Radio, Allied Radio. There were lots of them out. I built a lot of them myself and still have some of them. Fact I have a CW transmitter now for sale on the internet. A Drake CW rig that runs 10 meters thru 80 meters. I used it in a lot of CW contest and won a lot of them. Used to do a lot of CW QRP work also. Those were rigs that ran on 500 millwatts or less. When I was into backpacking we would take them and transmit off the mountain tops. Usually we would do it until the batteries gave up. Usually gathered a audience so we would give them away to other prospective ham radio people. I still run CW today and it is my preferred mode. I used straight code keys but have every type their is. I used to collect them at Ham radio fest. Picked a lot of old military ones that clamped on the leg. Just a fun hobbie. Then you could build all this stuff, getting many of the parts from old radios, TV's later. Not its all on chips. My call letters are WA1NLA for ham radio.
I hold the Advanced class ticket and that is also my car license plate.

I can see where the horses would have crowed that hobby out. To different trains of thought for sure. On the other hand, comunication with a horse or people wireless are both needed skills to get the best out of either hobby. Ham Radio was my primary hobby for along time and I was very active in it. I'm about 45 minutes from W1AW kind of the grandfather of Ham Radio who has there business where Henry Maxium Pierce lived. His shack is still active and where W1AW runs out of. I have operated their station many times on CW. W1AW still broadcast code nightly for those trying to learn it.

We have a lot of the same interest. I actually learned morse code in the boyscouts but never used it until I got my Novice ticket. ONce I got hooked on it, I would go to Boston about every other month to upgrade my license.

George-CT
 
on the hundreds of stories and conversations that have taken place on this Forum, you will come to the conclusion that most of the folks on this Forum have more in common with each other than not. Just think about it! Please have a great day! Kelley (Texas) :)
 
Most here have a variety of interest. Just a real curious bunch of folks who enjoy what life has to offer. Here most of us are older folks yet still looking for new things to try and do. I feel that helps keep one among the living. Hey, good luck on your trip out to see your horse this week. I hope you get to take that ride on Blueberry you mentioned in another post. My wife just came in from a ride on Ace.
He was a little jumped today with the high winds and leaves blowing around.

Geo
 
I made a pinhole camera when I was a kid. I found an old Kodak box camera with a broken lens. I took out the lens & shutter & replaced both with a thin sheet of brass. The Cub Scout manual said the hole in the brass was supposed to be .075" in dia, but since I didn't have anything to measure it with I poked the brass with a dissecting needle & then filed off the dimple. It worked. My 'shutter' was a piece of black electrician's tape. It took some experimenting to figure out how long exposures needed to be, but the thing took pretty good pictures. It used the old 616 film you can't get any more. It was Kodak Verichrome Pan, which was about ASA 30, so it was real slow & fine-grained. My camera was better than an oatmeal box because I could take 8 photos without having to reload. The cubmaster wasn't too fond of my using a regular camera to make my pinhole camera, but he couldn't argue that it wasn't a pinhole camera, since it didn't have a lens or a shutter. I never made a crystal radio, though. I still don't like to mess with anything that involves electricity. I got the bejeezis shocked out of me a couple of times when I was a kid & I'm still shy of that stuff.
 
which means that you would not have to make a shutter or film holder? I do not understand how a camera can take a picture with just a hole rather than a lens. I know where Debbie has her old Kodak Instantmatic Camera...I may take the lense out of it and replace it with a piece of brass sheet metal and see how it does. Kelley (Texas) :)
 
If you'll darken a room--it doesn't have to be absolutely dark, tho that helps--then make a small hole in a shade opposite a blank wall, on the wall you'll see, projected in a circular upside-down image, what's outside. That's how a pinhole camera works. In the case of my old Kodak, it had a film-holder built in & the little red indicator hole on the back told me when I'd advanced the film sufficiently.

The technique is called 'camera obscura,' which literally translates 'dark room.' Those wonderful 'perfect-perspective' drawings in the 19th Century--& earlier--were made with a portable camera obscura. The US Corps of Topographical Engineers--the Army's mapmakers--used 'em all over the west. The guys called 'em 'the dammed ol' sweatbox,' but they were how those drawings were made. I did an article about 'em in Charley Eckhardt's Texas on texasescapes.com, but you'l have to scroll down a ways to find it. It was sometime in '07, I think.

The technique pretty much died out once portable photography became common. Sears, in the 1890s, sold a table-top version of a camera obscura as a 'sketchette,' & as late as the 1950s a version of it was being hawked to kids in comic-book ads. That one never worked very well because the need to exclude all light except that coming from the illluminated subject was never addressed by the device.
 
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