Holmium V3

The 3rd version of the Holmium is a project that I put on hold for a long time, I finished the mechanics and rangefinder and then simply didn’t have the time to put it all together until I had finished all of my studies, in some ways it’s a camera I just maybe didn’t feel like finishing.

I redesigned the entire rangefinder mechanism for it, and even polished some of the lenses by hand, some of the other small ones were surplus, finding them would be very difficult. The advance mechanism is fundamentally the same as V2, but perfected, and half the size as I machined all of the pieces out of aluminium on my desktop cnc mill.

I remember telling my brother, after I had finished the Holmium, that I might be done with building cameras, and that I might just not make any more. I felt somewhat burnt out on the whole endeavour, and finishing the camera felt more like something I ‘should’ do rather than something I was excited to do, partly because I felt like I knew the camera would still not be perfect.

Building cameras is tricky, they’re fickle things, and if you have your expectations high on what you’d like to achieve with them, you can often be disappointed. The camera isn’t perfect, it has many flaws, the advance mechanism is good, but it’s not very robust, and the rangefinder can also go out of calibration. overall though, it’s probably the most complete camera I’ve ever built, and the only big flaw remaining is the focusing unit, which has some light leaks.

I may return to make a v4 some day,.there’s a lot I would change to get there, I unfortunately don’t have the time to explain all of the inner workings of the camera, but hopefully some of you will enjoy the 3d files and learn something from it.

the files are under the CERN Open Hardware License