Polaroid 95a 120 Film Conversion With Legos

The Polaroid 95a Land camera was manufactured from 1954-1957. It is a beautiful camera, and it is a shame that they don’t make film for it anymore. When my friend gave me this camera, I knew I had to modify it somehow to make it usable. I came close to modifying it so I could use it with my Polaroid 545 back, but I couldn’t bring myself to hack off the back of this camera. So, I decided to convert the Polaroid 95a to accept medium format 120 film. A quick measurement showed that I should be able to get a 6×10 image on 120 film. Here are the instructions for how to modify a Polaroid 95a to a usable 6×10 medium format camera. Oh, and I fabricated most of the new camera assembly out of Legos.

The first, and maybe the hardest part of modifying our Polaroid 95a camera is going to be stripping out all the rollers and unnecessary parts. We need to make as much room for our medium format Lego assembly as possible. I used a needle nose pliers, a drill to drill out the rivets, a hammer, and alot of elbow grease. Here is what your gutted Polaroid 95a looks like after you remove all the rollers:

With the hard part out of the way, you are ready to play with legos. To advance the film, you will need to drill a hole in the top of the camera to put your film advance knob through. My hole wasn’t in exactly the right place so you can see where I used a dremmel to make a little more room on the right (this is looking at it from the top):

I used a larger gear to turn a smaller gear. This allows one turn of the knob to advance the film one frame. The downside is that it puts a little too much pressure on the gears and if I am not careful it will miss a gear.

The next step is to build the part that will hold the spool. Here is a closer look at my assembly with and without the spool:

There isn’t a lego piece that will fit perfectly in a 120 spool so we will have to fabricate our own. A Dremmel and some sand paper should do the trick. Here is the before and after photo:

The left side of the camera is where the unexposed roll of film will sit. This side is less complex than the film advance side because all it has to do is hold the film. A size 8 lego fits almost perfectly here. Keep in mind that you want the spool to be exactly straight accross from the spool on the other side so it doesn’t bind. It should look like this:

Now that we have a place for the spool on both sides, it is time to build a guide in the center. This keeps the film tight and prevents it from getting off the spool on the right. I used matte board and it looked like this after the film is loaded:

Now all you have to do is fill any holes and test it out. It is a good idea to waste a roll of 120 film so that you can test your advance knob and make sure everything lines up. If any piece is loose or not perfectly aligned it will cause problems. I had to tweak things quite a bit before it loaded and advanced properly.

You are now ready to take pictures. There is one other thing to keep in mind before you start shooting up film. Old Polaroid cameras had their own system of “light values.” Rather than setting the shutter and aperture separately, the Polaroid 95a has 8 different settings (1-8). Don’t ask me the reason for this setup, but I can show you this chart that shows what each setting actually is in terms of shutter speed and aperture:

Polaroid #	Aperature	Shutter Speed
1	f/8.8	1/12
2	f/8.8	1/25
3	f/8.8	1/50
4	f/8.8	1/100
5	f/12.5	1/100
6	f/17.5	1/100
7	f/25	1/100
8	f/35	1/100

The chart above uses information taken from www.rhwhirled.com which is a great resource if you want to learn more about the Polaroid 95a or many other older Polaroid cameras. Good luck with your modifications and drop me an email if you decide to undertake this hack.

Ebay is my favorite place to find deals on great old cameras. Here are the Polaroid 95a cameras on Ebay right now:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 6th, 2005 at 10:11 pm and is filed under Antique, Camera Reviews, Medium Format, Polaroid. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.