I found a good deal on some 65mm film. Now what?

My plan is to slit it down to make 220 film. I like my Hasselblad 500c/m and the E6 out of it is just amazing on the lighttable. So, how to cost effectively shoot more? Hence, the 65mm film.

Since 120/220 is nominally 60mm wide, how hard can it be to accurately trim 2.5mm off each side? Hmm…

But I’m getting ahead of myself here. What are my options for exposing this stuff? With a usable space between the sprocket holes of ~52mm, we are not very far from the actual 56x56mm image area of normal Hasselblad images.

The A12V back is a 4.5×6 back that gives you portrait format 645 on standard 120 film, at the expense of image area on the right and left. Given I have the sprocket holes already taking up space, the loss offends me a lot less. So lets slip the film into the back and mark the maximum image with a pen:

It doesn’t look too bad. By the way, the thick (badly aligned) lines are actually a 60mmx45mm. So the A12V is noticeably smaller than that. Closer to ~53×39, but still a very good option and likely to give the A12V more work than it currently gets.

What about an A12 6×6? Actually, this doesn’t look too bad does it? The sprocket holes are only just intruding into the image area. I’m liking this more and more.

Ok, can I process this stuff? If I can’t easily get it into my reels, then life gets much harder. On my first try, the radial spokes in my stainless steel reel kinked the film and made loading impossible. So, I trimmed ~2mm off one side. Much better, I could load, but the film still kinked at each spoke, so another 2mm off the other side. Very good. The film loads easily (the base is much stiffer than the commercial 120 I’m used to) and has a very small amount of play side to side. Just like normal 120.

Now, of course, I need some way to slit 33 inches (840mm) of the stuff to make 120 and twice that for 220. In the dark. Without cutting me too. Time to go to the hardware store and start experimenting.