In 1949 Sears introduced the Tower Type-3, a Leica rangefinder clone made by Nicca.
This example came to me recently very cheap in a mixed lot of cameras. It was pretty good cosmetically, but the shutter was lagging. I did some shutter curtain tension adjusting and hoped it was good to go.
The Industar f:3.5 / 50mm lens, clone of a Leica Elmar, from my Russian Zorkii 1 seemed a good fit for a test run.
A couple of days ago I loaded a roll of Kodak 200 film, in date and C-41 color process, and exposed 25 frames around the house and yard.

Sunday I made my very first attempt at home film developing. I have no place for a darkroom, and the film went into a Paterson developing tank while in my changing bag. Once loaded the tank is light tight. Further steps could be done out in the open.

I used "Caffenol" developing, no harsh chemicals. With Caffenol, color film develops as a monotone.
Here is the formula I went with:
In 12 ounces of water at 68 degrees F, I dissolved 3 1/2 teaspoons washing soda, 2000 mg Vitamin C, and 5 teaspoons of instant coffee crystals.
The mix went into the developing tank with the film, and I agitated periodically, timing it for 16 minutes.
After pouring out the mix I immediately did 4 rinses of plain water with agitation.
Then I refilled the tank with saturated salt water solution, about 6 ounces plain table salt in 500 ml of water, as a fixer.
After 2 1/2 hours or so I poured out the salt water and gave it several rinses of warm water.
The tank was opened, and the film strip came off the reel for air drying.

The results on the film were very dense. It was dark, and images were barely visible. Since this was negative film, that told me that everything was too light.
When dry I cut the film into lengths of 5 images and put my Epson Perfection 4490 scanner to work.
It was an effort, but I coaxed images from the film, and worked further in ACDSee software.

Film was over developed from edge to edge, and consistent through the entire roll, so that rules out light leak.
I think next time I do the Caffenol recipe I will cut down the developing time from 16 minutes to no more than 8 minutes or so, see what happens.

And another issue was plain to see, with pattern of bright white spots on every frame in the same place. That means that the cloth shutter curtains of this camera is full of pinhole leaks in the material. The camera is a bottom loader, no back door, so I could not have known that without almost complete disassembly of the camera body.
So the camera will sit on the shelf, a display item, unless someday I am willing to do a complete tear down.

By the way, as I said, Caffenol treats C-41 process color film as it it were black and white. The sepia tone was added by me in the software. I just like it better that way.

Please click on thumbnails to see enlarged.
All images are ©2020 E.J.Kowalski.
Thanks!
Ed