Ball Bearing Shutter

marked as patented in 1913

The Ball Bearing shutter was very common on old Kodak cameras. It appeared when Kodak wanted to become more independent from suppliers of shutters and lenses like Bausch & Lomb. Many Kodak cameras of that time got a Kodak shutter but still a Bausch & Lomb lens or vice versa. The Ball Bearing Shutter is a five-blade leaf shutter, often with choice between two or three instant speeds plus bulb and time mode. It has a screw mount for a remote cable. The Ball Bearing shutter is famous for its odd speed selection scale with the B mode between the first and the second instant speed, and the T mode between the second and the third instant speed. The shutter unit also contains a ten-blade diaphragm. The aperture scale may be given in the U.S. aperture system, with the 4 equivalent to f-stop f8 and the 64 equivalent to the f-stop f32.

Links

• Ball Bearing shutter in detail at Camera Collecting and Restoration [1]
• repair instructions on vintage-camera-repair [2]