35 into 127 Won't Go - Or Will It!

In most cases, loading a 35mm Film Canister into an old 127 Camera is really quite easy. If there's room in the camera for the canister, as there is in this old Kodak Brownie (right), you can buy or fabricate adapters to extend the Spool to 127 width. It’s then simply a case of taping the film end onto the Take-up Spool, covering the red window on the back of the camera with tape, and you’re good to go. You will of course be exposing the full film width, including the area where the Sprocket Holes are, but if you have the facility to scan the whole width it can give quite an interesting look to your photos. It may even work!

So why would we even want to do this? Well, the main reason is that there are a lot of old 127 cameras out there gathering dust, many of which are really quite attractive, possibly even good cameras. A secondary reason is that until recently it was quite difficult to get hold of 127 film rolls, and even now it's not a common film stock and therefore developing costs are likely to be higher.

Where things get more difficult is when the camera body is so small it won’t take a standard 35mm film canister, as is the case with this Bencini Comet II (left). There’s really no way I can think of to get around this problem, it’s a solid cast body so not easy to modify, and the canisters don’t take kindly to being squashed. Whichever way you look at it, if you want to use 35mm film in this camera you’re either going to have to re-spool it onto 127 paper backing, or as I've attempted here, directly onto a spare take-up spool… in the dark natch'.

So the first job was to acquire a spare 127 Spool for the film-load. A local charity shop came to the rescue here, and I now have a spare Kodak Brownie (above) if anyone would like it. Practice makes perfect so the next task was to put a scrap film through the whole process. This also gave me an opportunity to work out how much I'd need to wind on the camera for each exposure, two full turns as it happens (right).

As I'd be working in the dark, and under a large swatch of Black Felt for extra light-safety, re-spooling and attaching the film needed to be as simple a task as possible, so I attached a tail with a short tongue of Sellotape to the Wind-on Spool, and taped the film tail onto the Spool that I'd be winding the film canister onto (above). The wind-on went well, so I then needed to cut the film at the canister end, and carefully, blindly, stick it as straight as I could to the Sellotape on the tail of the Wind-on Spool. This also went surprisingly well, a few inches of careful wind-on confirming that all seemed to be working as it should do. So I closed up the back, put some extra black insulation tape around the seals to be sure, watched the last 10 minutes of the Football and went to bed...

The film seemed to wind-on reasonably freely, and whilst I wasn't counting I'm guessing I got around 14-16 shots out of this 24 exposure film. Cutting and re-attaching the film back onto the tail of the original film, ready for winding back into the canister, also went well, and it's now ready to drop into my preferred developers who'll hopefully deal with the unorthodox methodology and work out how to scan a full-width 35mm film for me.

Meanwhile, here are some photos from a bit of post-use maintenance on the (very small) Viewfinder window, which I found was really quite dirty and difficult to see through in the strong sunlight (right). The Viewfinder part of the camera is very easy to work on with an appropriately small screwdriver, accessed by removing just two screws (below), and entirely separate from the lens/shutter mechanism so there's nothing much to break. The Viewfinder glass has now cleaned up beautifully, and I find I'm getting more and more attached to this camera, assuming of course that it produces half-decent photographs...