Fixing the Polaroid 545 film holder
June 19th 2007Monica picked up a Polariod 545 film holder for the Speed Graphic some time ago for the low low price of $15. How she did this I don’t know, given the prices tend to be a bit higher. Needless to say, we were thrilled as we’d been itching at trying our hand at Type 55 P/N film (the negatives are what we’re going for).
Before we went off into Type 55 land, we picked up a few boxes of Type 79 and Type 57, which are positive only films. Our reasoning was pretty simple: they were short expired boxes at half off and we wanted to just test out the holder. This turned out to be a good thing, because the holder was not grabbing the film correctly. Using Type 55 would have been a four dollar mistake each time, but using the expired film proved useful.
The holder was actually easy to repair, as Polaroid has the breakdown in this available manual (note it’s for the 545i, but it still worked for our holder). Combined with the information from S.K. Grimes about fixing the holder in the field, we were easily able to remove the remnants of the broken film cache left by whomever owned it before us.
Since the repair, we’ve been burning through our expired film and having a blast doing it. Type 55 here we come.
Reader Responses