Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/04/03
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]David, I'm amazed at the story of DIY Kodachrome processing. When I was a student I worked summers on the first Kodachrome film processor licensed by Kodak. It was built about 1960/61 by Drewry Photocolor Corp. of Glendale CA. Two of us worked each twelve hour shift. I usually worked inside the machine in the dark with a pair of staple guns in holsters in case of a break in the film. Film was spliced with a cement into 4000 foot reels by little old Mexican ladies in a dark room. It ran about 135 ft/minute in and out of many vertical tanks of nasty chemicals. When one of the hundreds of nylon rollers siezed the film would break and an alarm woke me up. I would reach into the tanks in the dark, retreive the loose end and pull it into a garbage can of water untill another guy could get inside and splice leader onto the outgoing film and restore tension. I was the only guy who didn't get bad dermatitis from the chemistry so I got the inside job for the great rate of $1.65/hour. The processor ran 35mm on one side and 16mm on the other. We either ran film or blank leader 24 hrs a day. It was very noisy and misty in that machine but I guess it didn't hurt me in the long run. The Kodachrome process was invented by a couple of musicians who did all the R & D in an appartment in N.Y. in the 1930's. Simply amazing! Bill Lawlor - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html