WARNING: The following contains an excess of bad puns and overall nuttiness.
Well, it's been a long time since I haven't built something really special. But this time I think I outdid myself!
It all started from a long time memory of those years I spent living on a desert island. Not that I was alone, there was a movie star, a millionaire and his wife, an eminent scientist and the boat's captain and his first mate. I was young and all I had to play with was a coconut... Ah, those days!
Well... OK, even though I extensively watched Gilligan's island when I was a kid, I never set foot on a desert island where I could live in a bamboo bungalow... and my only experience with coconut came from those delicious cookies I had... but still.
The other day, I was at the grocery store when I saw a beam of heavenly light coming down from the ceiling showing me the way to a basket of coconuts. They were basking in a flood of light created by a spotlight... looking at me in all their fuzzy brown goodness. One of them looked just like the head of a smiling sloth and I just couldn't leave it there.
I must have been in desperate need for a new toy, so I had a brainwave like only a nut could have... well, I was a bit hungry and tired and I thought of how much Gilligan would have loved to get his own Gillicam... And, I was the one who would make one for no other reason than because I can. So I got it and proceeded to the conversion. I set myself some rules: use only what would have been available on a desert island to craft the camera. Then I looked at the garage and said the heck with those rules, lets just make it.
I found some boards. They weren't really straight but I said whatever, lets use them. I drained and cut my nut in half (and no, it didn't give me a splitting headache) and removed all the pulp that was inside. I then marked the outlines on the boards and proceeded to cut holes to fit the nuts in. Once everything fit together, I just held them in place with hot glue.
To hold it on the tripod, I took some scraps of wood and made a custom fitted bracket using a contour replicating tool (it's made from a series of wires in a holder and works very well, they sell them in good hardware stores, but I had mine for what seems like forever).
For the tripod nut, I used one of those screw-in adapters... my last one.
At that point, it must have been supper time or something... I decided to make the pinhole out of a piece of the top of a soup can that I banged into shape using the handle of a screwdriver. Once it fit the contours of the interior of the coconut, I glued it in place with a bit of epoxy and sealed the leaks with aluminum tape that I then covered with hockey tape. I drilled the hole to precisely 19/1000 of an inch. That's one small drill bit!
Now came the holding the whole thing together part... I wanted something free and widely available. Mailman's rubber bands would do the trick. So I shaped some notches in the board so that they would always be at the same place.
For light-proofing, black foamy craft sheets were selected... but didn't work. I then added more foamy... didn't work. So I got tired and just used some weatherproofing foam.
While aluminum is usually a good material for pinholes, I tend to like using soup cans when I can. I can use them with a magnetic shutter that is dead simple to make. I just took a recycled neodymium magnet from an old toy and glued it to an old arcade token. Perfect!
A bit of black paint inside and there you have it, a perfect Cocokodak pinhole camera.
Does it work... I still have to find out.
