When shooting film, one is always on the look for easier/cheaper ways of getting it. These days, with film costs increased to unsuspected heights only a few years ago, the main way of shoot cheaper is to load your own cassettes. Not very hard to do this, and for this one needs two principal objects: a roll of bulk film and film cassettes, empty, to fill them with said film.
I started to reload my 35mm film cassettes back in the 90s, not because it was cheaper (it kind of wasn’t really) but because I needed some emulsions which came in bulk only, like Surveillance film. Given that I was already doing my own reloads of Minox film at that time (and still am), the 35mm reloading came pretty easy.
Initially I was using 35mm empty canisters, collected from my local Jessops shop. Easy enough to reload, but the very short lead left on the cassettes was always a pain. So, after a trip to Germany at some point in 2000 or 2001, I got a good number of empties from a local photo lab in Köln. The empties were of ORWO type, both pan and chrome film, in excellent condition. I believe I got some 20 of them, and I used these extensively for a good number of years.
The reason I got hooked on these was the fact that they had a threaded cap, the felt of very good quality, and made of sturdy plastic. So I started using these, without any problem whatsoever. Of course, they eventually wore out, and I had to replace the lot, one by one. Only this time it was harder than I thought, nobody was willing to part with these anymore, not so easily that is. And for certes not cheap anymore.
I started to buy from the internet, wherever I could find this type, in ones and twos even. I collected whatever I could find on the market, usually buying expired rolls only for the cassette, and this was what I did for a good while. I still have some 8 or 10 such cassettes, still in very good shape. However, at one point a friend of mine gave me a brand new 35mm metallic cassette, made in the late 80s in the former USSR. I reload it, and the entire process was very easy. I looked for more such cassettes, because these were a game changer for me at least.
I recently purchased this lot of 10 new (actually NOS) from Ukraine, and the cost is not small, but they are worth their weight in film, as it were. The felt looks and feels in good order, not dry or sticky. The caps, which are of the push type, are tight and connect really well. Suffice to say that I haven’t had any issues with light leaks so far.