The last bag bellows I made was an ongoing disaster. Unable to find a replacement for the blackout cloth that Porter’s Camera used to carry, I pulled apart some old bellows screw-ups with lacquer thinner and cut them into pieces to be stitched together. Trying to remove the glued-on paper stiffeners from the pleats pulled off some of the vulcanized rubber coating from the material as well, and the resulting bag bellows leaked like a sieve. I tried to patch the interior by laminating more scraps of blackout cloth to the interior and when that didn’t work very well I painted the whole inside with liquid electrical tape. The result was a humid, out-gassing and shapeless mass with a semi-gloss interior that, while light tight, still flared unmercifully even in low light situations from lens light scattering around inside.