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Subject: MF3D mounts available again for purchase
Date: 2019-04-02 01:00:07
From: iandvaag
Hello friends,

I've secured a source of cardstock for my mounts (the same brand that I've always used), and I'm happy to announce that the mounts are again available for purchase. The price will remain at 0.60 USD each, since I will continue to sell the mounts at cost. I'm sorry for the lapse in availability, and I'm planning to build up a bit more inventory to hedge against problems in the supply chain for the paper I use.

I've been spending a bit of time reading some of the awesome sites of MF3Ders from the '90s and early 2000s via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, and I've been inspired to put together my own personal website for MF3D that you can find here:
solidsight.net

There's a web store on my new site where the mounts can be purchased. Of course, you can always just send me an email, and I can make up a Paypal invoice.

Best regards,
Ian

P.S.
I'm always interested in the history of MF3D, so if anyone has some information about the history of cardstock mounts, I'm all ears. From what I gather, Steve Spicer of Australia originally had these manufactured along with 8 different styles of realist-format cardboard mounts. It seems they were available from his site, Kiewa Valley Stereo, and from Paul Talbot's Rocky Mountain Memories.

Subject: Re: MF3D mounts available again for purchase
Date: 2019-04-02 15:43:28
From: John Thurston
On 4/1/2019 10:56 PM, iandvaag@gmail.com [MF3D-group] wrote:
> I'm always interested in the history of MF3D, so if anyone has some information about the history of cardstock mounts, I'm all ears.

Paul! Paging Paul Talbot. Please pick up a white courtesy
phone . . . . Unfortunately, Paul hasn't been active here
for years :( I wish there was a Bat Sign, or equivalent, we
could use.

Many years ago, I asked how we landed on 132mm wide mounts.
132mm isn't the width of any stereo card I'm aware of. It
isn't a nice factional inch dimension (5 1/4" is 133.3mm).
It isn't the sum of 13+50+13+50+13. So I don't know how we
arrived at 132mm wide cardboard mounts.





--
John Thurston
Juneau Alaska
http://stereo.thurstons.us
Subject: Re: MF3D mounts available again for purchase
Date: 2019-04-02 23:06:41
From: flash3b
John,

What size were 6x13 glass stereo plates? Were they exactly 60 x 130 mm?  I don't own any, so I can't check.  You're right, it's odd that cardboard mounts are 132mm wide.

Does anyone know when the first medium format stereo transparencies were first made from film, rather than glass?  I've never seen any that are very old.  Did anyone ever make them as pairs of separate 6x6 transparencies in 70mm mounts?

--Paul Gillis
Subject: Re: MF3D mounts available again for purchase
Date: 2019-04-03 04:49:15
From: Bob Aldridge

I have some MF glass slides somewhere - but I can't find them at the moment... However, the "notional" size was, of course, "6 x 13" centimetres...

I do have a MF Taxiphote tray handy, though, and the length of the slots is 130.32mm as close as I can measure it...

Which really doesn't help us!

However, I'm not sure that Paul Talbot was the originator of the card mounts, was he? I thought it was Steve Spicer in Australia???

Bob Aldridge

On 02/04/2019 22:43, John Thurston juneau3d@thurstons.us [MF3D-group] wrote:
 

On 4/1/2019 10:56 PM, iandvaag@gmail.com [MF3D-group] wrote:
> I'm always interested in the history of MF3D, so if anyone has some information about the history of cardstock mounts, I'm all ears.

Paul! Paging Paul Talbot. Please pick up a white courtesy
phone . . . . Unfortunately, Paul hasn't been active here
for years :( I wish there was a Bat Sign, or equivalent, we
could use.

Many years ago, I asked how we landed on 132mm wide mounts.
132mm isn't the width of any stereo card I'm aware of. It
isn't a nice factional inch dimension (5 1/4" is 133.3mm).
It isn't the sum of 13+50+13+50+13. So I don't know how we
arrived at 132mm wide cardboard mounts.

--
John Thurston
Juneau Alaska
http://stereo.thurstons.us

Subject: Re: MF3D mounts available again for purchase
Date: 2019-04-03 05:24:37
From: Bill Hibbert
I've just measured a couple of randomly-selected glass 6x13s. They are 128.7 x 59.35 mm and 129 x 59.1 mm which is I think fairly typical. They seem for obvious reasons to be more undersize than oversize. Inside the front cover of many taxiphotes hangs a gauge which can be used to check that the slide size is within limits, but unfortunately I can't access my taxiphotes at the moment as they're in storage. Note that this also checks for thickness - my two are both about 1mm but I have seen them nearer 2mm.

The picture is complicated by the fact that good slides were often 'doubled' with another sheet of glass to protect the emulsion, and the two bound together with sealing tape round the edge. This makes the slide more than twice as thick and another couple of mms bigger all round. They're a real nuisance for viewers, because if the viewer will accept them (not all have a slot wide enough), it will be so wide that standard slides will flop backwards and forwards, losing precise focus.

There was also a 7x13 size, apparently chosen by Jules Richard because he disliked the wastage involved in cutting whole plate sheets down to 6x13. It was never popular, and slides and viewers in this format are relatively uncommon.

The only film 6x13s I've ever seen were bound between sheets of glass as above, and were actually sold to me as standard bound glass slides, but it's apparent on closer examination that there is actually a separate film layer there. Otherwise, I suspect they may have been mounted as separate images. This item may be of interest - I can't vouch for the accuracy of anything in it...


Bill

Subject: Re: MF3D mounts available again for purchase
Date: 2019-04-03 05:39:41
From: Alan Lewis
Re: history of MF mounts

I think the King Inn MF mount set the current standard if I remember correctly. 
Didn't it pre-date the Spicer mounts?  I remember the Spicer mounts were based on the King Inn mounts unavailabilty?

King Inn was a MF stereo camera, viewer and mount system that I learned about from Q-Vue.
Subject: Re: MF3D mounts available again for purchase
Date: 2019-04-03 07:20:37
From: 3-d@sbcglobal.net
Were the Spicer mounts originally sold by the founder of RMM; Joel Alpers?
I'll have to go back in my records but I think Joel was the first one I dealt with when offering my SaturnSlide kit which used the King Inn size mounts from Q-Vu.

I just found the old Q-Vu site still there from 1997 it seems:
http://brawleyonline.com/~quellen/qvu.html
Subject: Re: MF3D mounts available again for purchase
Date: 2019-06-01 12:42:01
From: iandvaag
I spoke to Joel Alpers last week regarding the folio, and while I had him on the phone, I asked him a few questions about the mounts.


Steve Spicer had the original dies made for square-aperture mounts. Joel had some dies made for some of the different cropped apertures, and he Steve worked together and shared the dies. Joel said he thinks Steve has all of the dies at the moment. (Does anyone have the contact information of Steve Spicer?!) Joel also said that Steve was involved with producing dies to cut the components of the SaturnSlide -- Alan, do you have any information about this? Maybe it's time to dust off the dies and make some viewers!


Joel said he thought the dimensions were chosen to fit a commercial viewer previously available. Like Alan mentioned above, I believe Joel was referring to the King Inn viewer. From my understanding, the King Inn appeared in about 1990 – I'm surprised that MF3D as we know it today doesn't predate 1990. The King Inn mounts and viewer were distributed in the US by The Quellen Company, but does anyone know who the original Taiwanese manufacturer was? The original King Inn mounts can be distinguished by their much larger radius on the rounded external upper corners of the mount where the mount is folded, which is reminiscent of the arched tops of classic stereocards.


Joel said that he decided to continue producing mounts with 132 mm x 80 mm dimensions since Alan's SaturnSlide viewer that he distributed supported that format (He also said the SaturnSlide was made a bit wider to support “another existing mount”, I’m not too sure which this is).

Subject: Re: MF3D mounts available again for purchase
Date: 2019-06-02 06:33:53
From: Alan Lewis
>> Joel also said that Steve was involved with producing dies to cut the
components of the SaturnSlide -- Alan, do you have any information about this?<<
I did all my own manufacturing at home by cnc for all my Stereo Viewers.  No dies or molds were ever made for any of my designs.  I never worked with Steve Spicer but my viewers were designed to fit the King Inn MF mounts and Steve made better quality compatible mounts so our products got paired together usually.

>>Joel said he thought the dimensions were chosen to fit a commercial viewer previously available. Like Alan mentioned above, I believe Joel was referring to the King Inn viewer. <<
Yes, the King Inn.  They made a twinned Yashica TLR camera system, mounts, and MF lighted viewer.  I used their mount to set a standard for the SaturnSlide MF viewer and it eventually became an accepted standard size mount for the hobbiest.  The King Inn MF mount was made from a thin low quality cardboard and was not very durable and I don't think any thought went into the placement of the aperture spacing.  The Spicer versions were made from a better quality cardboard, much stiffer and more durable.  More aperture size choices too.

>>Joel said that he decided to continue producing mounts with 132 mm x 80 mm dimensions since Alan's SaturnSlide viewer that he distributed supported that format (He also said the SaturnSlide was made a bit wider to support “another existing mount”, I’m not too sure which this is).<<
It may be possible I made a one-off SaturnSlide viewer for wider mounts for someone, I don't remember.  I did do some one-off versions of my viewers for specific customer requests.
I think some people did fit two single MF mounts to twin them in the viewer, and also some cut slots in the sides to fit wider mounts.
I also made achromatic conversion panels for the King Inn MF lighted viewer.  That viewer came with poor single element lenses and I converted them to achromatic lenses.  Q-VU was still selling the King Inn MF viewers and then people would add my conversion lens panel.
The only other wider MF mount I can think of is the newer 3d World which did not fit in a SaturnSlide.
Or maybe the couple of custom MF viewers I made for viewing antique stereo glass plate stereo pairs.
Or perhaps he was thinking of the SaturnSlide 35 viewer I made that would accept Realist, twin 35, and Franken mounts.

I got into my WABAC machine and found the dimension I measured of the original King Inn Mount from Q-VU:
131.8mm wide
81mm tall
51.6mm wide by 52.4mm tall apertures
9.52mm spacing between inside edges of apertures

All this is subject to someone else having a better long term memory than me!
Subject: Re: MF3D mounts available again for purchase
Date: 2019-06-02 09:50:34
From: iandvaag
>> I did all my own manufacturing
at home by cnc for all my Stereo Viewers.  No dies or molds were ever made for any of my designs.  I never worked with Steve Spicer but my viewers were designed to fit the King Inn MF mounts and Steve made better quality compatible mounts so our products got paired together usually. <<

Thanks for the correction, Alan. Joel didn't actually say it was the SaturnSlide, he said it was a Medium Format viewer that he and Steve made and sold. The only MF viewer I'd seen listed on the Rocky Mountain Memories website was the SaturnSlide, and I've never found a listing for a viewer for sale on the Kiewa Valley website, so I incorrectly assumed Joel was referring to the SaturnSlide. I wonder what the viewer that Joel and Steve made was like?

The paragraph where I wrote that the SaturnSlide was made a bit wider to support "another existing mount" is also incorrect. Joel was again referring to the viewer that he and Steve made. There doesn't seem to be any record of this viewer online. I will ask Joel the next time I speak to him regarding folio business.

Sorry for jumping to conclusions. Thanks for setting the record straight.
Subject: Re: MF3D mounts available again for purchase
Date: 2019-06-09 19:41:08
From: stereomirrors
Thought this was interesting, Old viewers that includes a MF Viewer(8th viewer down) from 1982  that looks like was using 60 x 130 mounts.
https://www.dewijs-3d.com/en/downloads/hand-held-viewers-historical/
Subject: Re: MF3D mounts available again for purchase
Date: 2019-07-02 11:05:15
From: coronet3d
I assume that viewer was primarily designed for the 60x130 glass plates of yesteryear.
Steve
Subject: Re: MF3D mounts available again for purchase
Date: 2019-07-30 14:18:07
From: stereomirrors
Yes, from the looks of this MF rotary viewer design for 60x130, it does look like its for that glass plate size.  https://www.dewijs-3d.com/en/services/used-products/
Subject: Re: MF3D mounts available again for purchase
Date: 2019-08-01 01:15:24
From: iandvaag
That's a really neat rotary viewer that I'd not seen before! Thanks for sharing.

Ian Andvaag
Saskatoon, SK