There are a lot of assumptions that we make—the main one being
“The Folmer Graflex Orthodoxy”…the primary tenet of this faith is that every Graflex seen in the OT was 100% a
Folmer top, bottom, clamp, glass eye, socket pins, etc. which somewhat flies in the face of the flashes I have purchased in the wild (which are often a mishmash of different bottoms, tops, glass eyes, etc., if they came from a prior photographer’s bag of equipment).
We also know that with multiple handles being used by the production, it is highly unlikely that they sought out ONLY 100% pure
Folmer flashes. I suppose that they could have, but I’m not quite sure why they would have. We have seen the appearance of the regular and thin knurled red button on different hilts so we know that they harvested different parts from at least two types of Graflex flashes, for certain.
Beyond a hero ANH hilt that we have pretty decent reference for, and which does appear to be a
Folmer, we really don’t know about the others.
But, the benefit of
“The Folmer Graflex Orthodoxy” is that one can purchase very nice vintage
Graflex Inc. flashes for 1/3 of the cost of a
Folmer, in the open market; so there are definite benefits to these assumptions