I will be posting some answers to frequent questions here for a couple of weeks and then will move those comments to my new FAQ page here - see to the right under "Order Parts" etc.
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Bill- Pass this to your new Ebay buddy. I dont know if either of you got a chance to wander my blog posts. If so, you see that there have been between seven to nine "official" changes of ownership of the Tiltall name and design iterations since the Marchioni brothers retired and sold to Leitz.
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Bill- Pass this to your new Ebay buddy. I dont know if either of you got a chance to wander my blog posts. If so, you see that there have been between seven to nine "official" changes of ownership of the Tiltall name and design iterations since the Marchioni brothers retired and sold to Leitz.
Re: yes we have no TEP3 - The thinner disk "column" handle, TEP3, stopped being produced in the mid 80s in favor of two TEP4s. Many Tiltall afficianado eschew the TEP4s in favor of two TEP1 for the column position - they are interchangeable. You can still find it on Ebay - I see TEP3 handle only about once a year.
[I always suggest, rather than buy anything my site, you purchase by Ebay, two identical Tiltalls - make the one perfect unit and part out the remainder of the crippled one - you will more than recover your original cost - cuz of folks out there in the situation just like you.]
And in the last production in September, the current manfacturer in Taiwan, KingHome, also changed to only two handles - the longer TEP2 head handle and the other three handles, formerly TEP1, TEP3 and TEP4, are just TEP1 - that is, to repeat - no more fat disk "TEP4" nor thinner disk "TEP3".
Long and short of it (fat and thin, really) is now the bullet shaped TEP1. A long time favorite "illegal" handle for the column positions since the Marchioni brothers first introduced Tiltall in 1946
That said, your next question will be how to use a Tiltall with a ballhead - why am I mentioning this? - because if this has even crossed your mind, doing so frees up the two top handles (you'll have a spare) for use down at the column/leg apex where your have a TEP3 missing - and my headless column is $45 (+$10/post) vs your TEP1 handles at $15 - take a look below.
