Graflex.org

[Paul Kinzer]

It looks like a made a mistake by buying a Wista 6x9 back on eBay last week. It arrived from Japan today (more quickly than the USPS gets things to me from my own little town in Wisconsin!), and I immediately saw that the mounting bits on the back do not match the camera, even though I had done research and was confident that it had a standard Graflok/Universal mechanism. It does not.

Now that I have it in my hands, I did more research, and it seems Wista made two different 6x9 backs: Type D and Type N. But, from looking at online photos, the mounting looks exactly the same on both, so neither will work. Either people have mislabeled things, or I'm just not that good at research.

The thing is, if I had only looked more carefully at the images of the back in the ad I ended up buying, I would have been able to see that it was not a match to the Baby Speed. I did look at them, but didn't scrutinize because I trusted all the online places that said the two would match.

I've put the back next to the Horseman 2x3 back I already have, which does fit perfectly, and figure I can probably modify the Wista to make it fit, but I'm not sure. It isn't worth the cost of shipping to return it to Japan.

I'd be grateful to anyone who might have something to say about this; either to confirm what I've said from their own experience, or to tell me if and how they might have gone about modifying one of these to get it to fit on a Graflok equipped camera. It looks like some careful grinding away of some of the plastic on the mating surface might do it, but I'm concerned that there might be film plane spacing issues, too, so that, even if I can get it to mount tightly to my camera, the ground glass focusing won't match up with the film distance in the back.

I'm posting this, mostly, so others can know not to do what I did.