I have been struggling with some weird behaviour of the new view camera and while equipment is usually the last thing to blame in your photography, this time it turns out I have done everything right (well, who knows) and, to put it bluntly, there was a bloody hole in the camera! I bought it from a friendly gentleman on eBay in the UK and according to him, the camera was serviced in London by an outfit called Teamwork. Excuse my directness, but they did an absolutely crap job. Obvious internal parts were missing before and now this. This reminds me of the London days, where once a bunch of incompetents called Albion Computers (an authorised Apple Service Provider) repaired my iMac to death, removing my hard disk, memory and other parts in the process, and refusing to put things back together (full story here: How Albinos shrank my iMac – this letter is one of many I had to write in the UK). Moral of the story: stay away from those people and appreciate Japanese service while you can.
Cool that you found it Dirk! When I read your story on photo.net and all your journey in large format photography, I feel like reading book from 1912 about pioneers of photography. Feels good, I wish you all the best with repair.
I was relieved and upset at the same time when I discovered the flaw. Relieved because it means that my technique is more or less working, because some of the results were decent. I was angry because I feel all my previous efforts were compromised and I have to step back and redo a lot of things.
But overall it is good because one can say that even with flawed equipment I could achieve good results, so from here on it can only get better!
I completely detached the bellows from its frame last night, cleaned and sanded it a little, then re-glued the parts thoroughly with some special black bond which takes 1-2 days to harden. The bellows is currently drying in the living room, and I would like to take it for a quick test this afternoon…
A bad lover blames his tool.
So what happend to your old data? Did Albion ever fix their issues. SOunds like you should have complained to MAC about them
I use to service MACs in college in 92-94 and the only problem I had with them was their service agreements. We would have people buy new machines take them back to the dorms and they would not work. They would bring them back to our shop the same day but we could not exchange what they bought for a new one we had to repair their damaged one. Obviously the policy has worked out well for MAC.
My next computer is a MAC, I have had it with windows,
The policy is still the same today. Repairs, no exchanges.
Fortunately I had backed up all the data, which was difficult on a first generation iMac that would not start up. The hard disk is difficult to access on those models.
We got the iMac back in bad shape in the end, I can’t remember the details now, but it was ruined… unreliable and with other strange problems. The point was that they touched components like memory and hard disk which had nothing to do with the actual problems (logic board).
And yes, I submitted this incident to Apple. Albion is still in business today, so who knows what happened.