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SY: Now, did you, were you actually, while you were, was this stuff that was just coming to you on your own? You didn't have, did you go to school? Did you have people...

KS: Some of it, no, this, that kind of thing, I worked it out myself on my own. Some things, little technical things, like later on in years I took night classes on specific items, like drafting, I would take a course in night high school and take a course in drafting alone so I can learn the basics of using the graphing instruments and doing the, how to lay out all kinds of patterns. And I went to college classes for specific information about optics or specific information of whatever I was, wanted to find out about. And in the meantime, I did a lot of my own experimenting while I was doing service work, and I did, I made up little test jigs and test instrumentation and all that stuff to see for myself what it does. So now when I was doing servicing on zoom lenses for, it's this Ingenieur zoom lenses, which is a French-made zoom lens, and I hadn't got, I had gotten to know the intricacies of the optical components and what is critical and what is not. So when I do the repair, I knew exactly what to do with it. I could take a Canon zoom lenses, when the Oscar came in, I took this Canon zoom lens, which is three hundred, it's a long lens like this, and they had a lever type control like this for zooming and for focus. It's an awkward thing. It's not possible to use it on motion picture. And my job was -- to get back to slightly, a bit earlier than that, is Century Precision was known as a schlock house. I mean, they put out cheap junk; it lasted about ten days and it would break apart. My associate, Peter Rippich, got hired on over there. His specific job was to raise their image, and Century contacted me 'cause I was competing with him with other products. They contacted me, said, "What we need you to do is create some products in our, what we call the program, the 2000 Series program, to lift the image of Century Precision to a professional level." "Well, if I do that there's several things you're gonna have to, you're obligated to follow as far as my agreement. One is, when I set up tolerance, you follow it, and when I set up a procedure and I get all these machines to be done, you follow it." That kind of thing, in order to control the quality that's going out the door, and they agreed to it. And they says -- and also, "In the machine shop, I need somebody that can work with me, that will hold the kind of tolerance and quality work that the machine needs to put out." So I had a guy that was quitting, I called him and I says, "You worked with me before at another company." I says, "I need you here." I says, "What can we do to agree, for you to agree to stay here with me for whatever period of time we need?"

Anyway, they come to an agreement. Fine, he worked as, he worked with me directly. And we developed, hand by hand, this conversion of the 150 to 600 zoom lens. Instead of the lever and thing, all that was thrown out and then we put in the normal cam controls and all this other stuff. And on the inside, I changed the support mechanism in there so they would stay straight and not weave like this. And all these things I did on this barrel, put it together -- it took about a year going back and forth and all this stuff, getting all that together -- and we finally got it completed. We had the first prototype put together, we sent it out for evaluation to other cinematographers, let 'em try it out. They raved about it. They liked it and all that. But when you look at the time, they're not used to having something take a long time to make, so when you stop and bring it down to how many hours it took, and if you put in a hundred and seventy hours, hundred and seventy dollars an hour and all that, that piece of equipment, when new, when you get it from Canon, is like fifteen thousand dollars. By the time we got through with it, it was a brand new different configuration of lens, I says, "They'd have to sell it for thirty-six thousand dollars, something like that." And they held it for almost a year. They couldn't make up their mind to sell it. Finally, Peter and I says, "Look, just get it out there, put a tag on it, and let 'em work with it." Within a few months, there were so many calls for it they couldn't keep up. I says, "You know, the philosophy in this industry is that they spend millions and millions of dollars to shoot a scene. They can't afford to have a fifty dollar lens break down in the middle of that scene 'cause it'll cost them a million dollars plus all your rental time. So thirty-six thousand dollars to them is nothing if it's guaranteed to work properly." [Laughs] And Century had lived on that product and they made over millions of dollars on it, and during the course of that time, because it was compared against three other versions from different companies and they awarded this one -- actually, they awarded all of 'em for technical achievement, but they notified, notified us that this lens here, by all tests and everything else, met all the aspects of quality and everything else. Images stay steady when it zooms, it stays in focus when it's in zoom, and all that stuff. That's not something that the others -- and that lens, that thing, it went to a rental house in, they bought the, one of the first, second or third one that Century put out, to Thailand or one of those backcountries over there, in a rental house. That thing was running for fifteen years without any service, with no, nothing. They'd just rent it, rent it, rent it. We finally got that lens back; they asked us, "Can you rebuild the lens?" I says, "Well, how often did you service it?" "We never serviced it." [Laughs] "You ran it for fifteen years renting it with no service?" I says, "You don't even do that with a Mercedes."

SY: Wow.

KS: But anyway, we got it back, we rebuilt it, we refurbished and replaced all the worn out parts, and it was, came out to the value of thirty-seven thousand dollars. It was like almost buying a brand new lens, but you got a brand new lens and returned, and now you can go another fifteen years. [Laughs]

SY: So that's the lens that actually was honored...

KS: Mechanical...

SY: Achievement?

KS: Achievement. The Oscar was given to, as mechanical achievements.

SY: And that, it was just that particular lens, that particular mechanism that was --

KS: No, no, not the mechanism, the whole lens.

SY: The whole lens.

KS: Yeah, the whole lens.

SY: So that was honored for its, 'cause it was the first of its kind as well.

KS: First of its kind.

SY: As well as it was so...

KS: Well, it proved out to be, this is long after, but it proved out to be --

SY: Durable.

KS: Durable. [Laughs] That was one of the historical parts of my reputation, that most of my lenses were either very easy to service or was durable, and it stayed put. Like we had the Kenji Series lens, a customer bought and he was up at the Himalayas for a week or more, up in the snow and very cold weather, he said, he wrote back and says, "That lens worked beautifully all throughout this, all this cold weather and everything else. Not a hitch." [Laughs] 'Cause they have problems with that, cold weather, everything attracts, grease gets hard, just... these lenses don't --

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.