Film Canister Presenter

When shooting with film rolls, I feel it wasteful to throw away the film canisters. They look cool and made pretty fine. I ended up building a collection of empty film canisters quickly. So do many film shooter. They can be reused by reloading film. More commonly, they can be used to make a decor, which looks nice on the tabletop or with a vintage camera.

The bottom of the canister has two stage indentation. The inner one can serve as a natural press fit socket. The measured diameter for the inner socket is 9.6mm. I interpolated 6 poles with diameters ranging from 9.5mm to 9.8mm and height of 7mm. For the outer indentation, I interpolated 6 cylinders with diameters ranging from 22.0mm to 23.0mm and height of 1.2mm.

After the press fit test, I chose 9.76mm and 22.84mm as the two diameters.

The final goal is to design a holder to hold multiple canister. Before design multiple version, I design a stool to hold a single film roll with the dimension. It fits pretty well with my Ektar 100 film canister. The max diameter is same with the bottom of the canister, 25.1mm.

By duplicating 6 copies of the singe version stool and create a square block to connect them, I got this shape. It works pretty well with holding 6 films. The distance between the two film canister is perfect.

I found the poles also fit into the other side of the canisters. The hovering effect looks even better.

A unexpected finding is the fact that film canisters have slightly different dimension. The opening size at the bottom varies from manufacturer to manufacturer. A Kodak's canister has a lager diameter, whereas Illford and Fujifilm has smaller diameter. The Fujifilm and Ilford canisters are difficult to take down once mounted. From image 3, you can see they broke down the poles after only 3 or 4 times of uninstalling. The broken piece stuck into the holes on the canister, difficult to take out.