Replacing the leather on a Kodak No1A Series III Autographic camera

When I obtained the old Kodak camera, built around 1920-30, in 2020, roughly a hundred years later give or take, it wasn't in great shape. (I'm saying "obtained" because I didn't buy it knowingly, I bought a camera lot and it happened to come with it).

The leather cover was very worn, and the outside as well as the inside of the camera was really dirty and grimy.

I had no idea how to proceed, but I knew it was possible, so the thought that I could try and replace the leather covers of the camera to give it a new look, a new life, and possibly feel rewarded by the experience started to appear at the back of my head.

I had bought replacement leather covers for my cameras before, from a store that sells precut leather stickers, but I had never been able to remove the old leathers (the timer screw on the Pentax ME super just won't come off), and I felt pretty stressed out thinking I might destroy one of my favorite SLRs. But here, the camera had no emotional or functional value to my eyes, and it felt more like I rescued it from being thrown into a dumpster than something that could hold value.

Or at least, it didn't look like it held value when I got it, and I was determined to try and change that.

Little did I know that it would be one of the most difficult (but, yes, rewarding also) craft projects I had ever undertaken!

For starters, I completely removed the previous cover, which was chipping and breaking, and incomplete - so there was really no way to salvage it. But I preserved it as much as I could. I scrubbed the camera clean from glue residue, rust, verdigris and other grime using rubbing alcohol, a product named "eau écarlate" (think goo gone but less greasy and oily), and some sandpaper.

Finding a replacement material was tricky. The original "leather" seemed to be a mix of cardboard and leather, and was extremely thin, around 0.5mm. I found some yellow vinyl leather with a woven backing, and decided that it would give the camera a modern yet classy look to reupholster it with yellow, so I went with this material. But the material was thicker, at around 1mm.

See here the original material on the right and the new one on the left:

The second issue was to cut through the vinyl to match the shape of the camera.

But first, I had to create a cutting pattern based on the geometry of the camera. And for my first homemade "skin-job" (yes I'm making a Blade Runner reference - this is a bit of a steampunk project anyways), I had chosen a difficult camera topology: one where the leather covers went around curves, angles, 1mm edges needing to be covered, round shapes all over, etc.

The camera not only had 3 different complex leather shapes on it, but the leather also needed to fit under the top of buttons, and under the Autograph pen (more on this later).

I use Illustrator everyday for work, so it only made sense to create the cutting pattern in Illustrator, based on photos of the actual camera:

Once my designs seemed satisfying, now came the moment to cut the leather along the lines.

I had recently bought a pen plotter, and assumed that I could just place a swivel-blade cutter in the pen plotter and that it would cut through the vinyl.

The first thing that slowed me down was the fact that pen plotters do not use Illustrator files, but rely on open source software, such as Inkscape - which I'm only a beginner at. Moreover, when you convert files made in Illustrator for Inkscape, the scale changes completely, so I had to recalculate the measurements of my patterns again, once the project was carried over in Inkscape (here's a related rabbit hole you can read).

So once my cutting pattern was to scale and in Inkscape, I tried cutting the leather using a swivel-blade in the pen plotter. That didn't work, because the blade would get caught in the thickness of the material, or woven backing.

So I resorted to doing things differently, and flipped the leather over to have the pen plotter draw the cutting shapes on the back of the leather, and proceeded to cut by hand using a cutter and straight guides. The material was very difficult to cut, but I was able to cut into straight lines well enough. Curved areas, small holes were tougher to cut however.

Another difficulty arose with the fact that I had no idea how to glue the leather onto the camera.

Back a hundred years ago, using the leather material they were using, I am sure that they could just use a brush to coat the back of the leather with glue, and then apply the leather on the camera and keep it in place using clamps and various holders.

But I had none of the experience and none of the equipment.

My tests with caulk were not conclusive (the leather peeled right off). I contacted the store that sold me the leather and they recommended fabric adhesive (well, duh) - but I had no idea whether the adhesive would stick to the metal of the camera, and ran a few more tests.

Both fabric adhesive I tried were the best options. The most difficult part, however, was to apply it. The texture of the fabric adhesive is very gooey, and obviously very sticky.

Not to mention that it dries pretty fast (and even faster the thinner the layer is), so anything that goes in contact with it - fingers, plastic gloves, anything used to keep it in place - would become stuck to it.

The glue also smells really strongly of chemicals, and working with minute details while trying to breathe in as little of this crap as possible was also quite a challenge.

Another thing making the use of the glue difficult is the fact that the glue tube's tips would dry out - maybe they're just supposed to be used once? And each tube comes with 3-4 tips, so you have to try to glue as much as you can and as well as you can each time.

And I had to apply the glue to some parts of the leather first, then keep it in place, then wait for it to dry, and then progress to another area of the same piece of leather - because I couldn't glue everything on all at once, and keep everything pressed against the camera's body at the same time.

This resulted in taking over the whole living room table for a couple of days (the whole project, with its leather cuts, camera parts, measurement sheets, and various tools had been occupying a noticeable area in the apartment for a while). And that meant using every and any object capable of holding things in place - including headphones!

But after a few failed tests, several days of trying the best way I could to do this as well as possible at the price of a lot of sweat, the camera had new leathers all around it, where the now defunct leather once laid.

And it was a sight to behold. Sure, there were some mistakes - limitations of the tools I was able to access during a year where social interaction and businesses were down to a halt because of the pandemic. But the final object looked reborn, having regained its clothes and its dignity after so many years of being left in the dust.

On this photo, I feel like the leather bumped near the edge because the glue dried out too fast:

It's more visible here, and although I really love the combination of the red frame window and yellow leather, I really with I had been able to cut the circular hole better! But I applied the thin edge atop the camera first, then the back, then the thin edge at the bottom. And by the time I applied the leather at the back, the alignment had shifted one millimeter and I had to widen the hole for the exposures window.

Other than that - and some edges where the leather meets, and I couldn't solve how to make the part where the leather meets more smooth - it's pretty much a success.

Exterior:

I love how snuggly the metal parts and the leather parts fit! As in the Kodak logo bar below.

The very thin, 1mm edge shows on the right side and the leather seems to peel off. I fixed that after taking the photos, and it's one of the difficult areas to place the glue since it's a very tight spot and the glue if very thick and sticky.

The alignment of the two pieces of leather - the front and back - looks very satisfying here:

This hole was very difficult to cut through and the leather and metal opening fit pretty well. Not perfectly though - we can see some of the leather's mesh through the small gaps:

Here's the autograph pen (more like a stylus) I was talking about before. It's a technology that was abandoned but allowed you to write what each photo was - what exposure settings you had set - or anything else you wanted! On the back of the film layer. I was satisfied with how I was able to make the leather fit under the stylus and around the hooks: