[womble]

Utterly bonkers, utterly brilliant!

[gaweidert]

Many. many years ago a person was visiting the Montezuma National Wildlife refuge. He. or she, I don't remember which, happened upon a once in a lifetime photo op. A great blue heron was attacking a muskrat. It speared it with it's beak to kill it. Then it swallowed the thing whole. All caught with with a Kodak 126 Instamatic camera. For some years the photos were on display at the visitors center. They faded and were tossed. I saw one gobble up a 4 foot long snake once while visiting there. No camera on me at the time.

On average, if you find one of those cameras, it has, on average, only 13 rolls of film run through it so the internals should be in pretty good shape. I used to get to test those once in awhile. Often working in environmental chambers that ranged from -10F (-23C) to +120F (49C) at various humidifies including the dreaded 96F (35.5C) with an RH of 86%. Sometimes all on the same day. I ran so many rolls of film through them that I swore that I could beat the Bionic Man thumb wrestling.

The most hectic time was the day the guy in the warehouse ran into a set of racks. This started a domino effect and by the time it was over some 2,500,000 cameras had been knocked around. Every single on of them was retested before they were shipped to the stores for Christmas.

Thank you for restoring it. They seem like cheap cameras, but a lot of people put a lot of effort into them to insure that they did old Kodak proud.

If there is a series of letters inside the camera it will tell you when it was made. They are called the CAMEROSITY Code. If it is 4 letters it it MMYY. If it is 6 letters it is MMDDYR. The Key to the code is simple. C=1, A=2 all the way up to Y=0. Every Kodak product had one marked on it somewhere. Since, back the, Kodak operated on a calendar the had 13 four week periods instead of 12 months, it is possible to have a 13 for the month.

George Eastman had a very disciplined mind and having months with different numbers of days in them drove him crazy. It made planning much more difficult. So he designed his own calendar to solve the problem. To him the 4 week planning period was much superior and he even tried to push it onto the world as a whole. Once in awhile the 13th period had an additional week to keep the calendar in sync with the solar year. In the manufacturing areas, the fourth week of the period was usually pretty crazy as shipping goals had to be met. It was not unusual to work Saturday to meet the schedule and then go into work on Monday having have little to nothing to do. The week also started on a Monday with Sunday being the last day of the week. So all Kodak people were bi-calendar. We were just not open about it. Being bi-calendar was just not something you talked about in polite company.

[ismaelg]

Thank you all for the comments!

The most hectic time was the day the guy in the warehouse ran into a set of racks. This started a domino effect and by the time it was over some 2,500,000 cameras had been knocked around. Every single on of them was retested before they were shipped to the stores for Christmas.

Thank you for restoring it. They seem like cheap cameras, but a lot of people put a lot of effort into them to insure that they did old Kodak proud.

If there is a series of letters inside the camera it will tell you when it was made. They are called the CAMEROSITY Code. If it is 4 letters it it MMYY. If it is 6 letters it is MMDDYR. The Key to the code is simple. C=1, A=2 all the way up to Y=0. Every Kodak product had one marked on it somewhere. Since, back the, Kodak operated on a calendar the had 13 four week periods instead of 12 months, it is possible to have a 13 for the month.

George Eastman had a very disciplined mind and having months with different numbers of days in them drove him crazy. It made planning much more difficult. So he designed his own calendar to solve the problem. To him the 4 week planning period was much superior and he even tried to push it onto the world as a whole. Once in awhile the 13th period had an additional week to keep the calendar in sync with the solar year. In the manufacturing areas, the fourth week of the period was usually pretty crazy as shipping goals had to be met. It was not unusual to work Saturday to meet the schedule and then go into work on Monday having have little to nothing to do. The week also started on a Monday with Sunday being the last day of the week. So all Kodak people were bi-calendar. We were just not open about it. Being bi-calendar was just not something you talked about in polite company.

Cool story! That must have been quite a warehouse to hold that many cameras! My understanding is that George Eastman adopted the Cotsworth calendar (13 months of 28 days each) but I'm not clear if he actually invented it. In the first page of this thread I discuss the date code on mine. YIOI which translates to 0868, or between July 14 to August 9 1968 according to my quick calculations.

Thanks!

[Sam_I_am]

Ishmael! AWESOME!

You have inspired me to find a junky old 126 and restore it using Ferrari colors so it can sit in front of yours...

[Astro-Baby]

As ever thats amazeballs. I dont know where you find the time, in the time its taken you to do this I have gotten as far with a planned restoration as moving the camera ffrom the junk shelf to my workspace and cleaning the lens cap

[35mmfilmfan]

To quote Arte Johnson (Laugh-In - same era) - 'Veerry Interesting - but ...'

Seriously, well done - an impressive way to 'Improve the shining hour'.