[LargeFormat] Wollensak Extreme Wide Angle Lenses

[Tim Atherton]

> One of my lenses looks like it could open wider.  Where is the screw you
> mention?

On the Rapax it's very simple - the aperture lever runs down underneath the
shutter before disappearing inside - there is a tiny little set screw that
is just screwed into the body and blocks the lever (you can see the are a
series of small holes with plugs - presumably you could set them up for
different lenses with different apertures) just take out the screw and
voila - you don't even need to go inside.

My 210mm f9 Kowa Graphic is mounted in a Copal 1. Like some of the other
copal shutters I have, the aperture lever will keep going beyond the widest
aperture. In most cases, it doesn't make a difference as the aperture blades
have already disappeared from sight inside the shutter. But in the case of
the Kowa, at f9 you can see the aperture iris blades aren't fully open -
keep sliding the lever until they disappear and you get to what must be
around f6.8 - again, a bonus for focussing. (before they became Kowa
Graphics, they were Kyvytars and they made an Apo-Kyvytar series that were
6.8 - someone I know bought an apo-kyvytar 210 6.8 recently and told me that
as far as they could tell it was identical to the Kowa Graphic 210 f9, it
just had the extra aperture stop listed...)

tim