DVPhoto

Well it has been over a year since I last mentioned this little camera of mine. Back then I promised to take the front shutter mechanism out and attempt to fix it, and have been putting it off ever since.

Well last night I finally decided to do it, and thankfully the fix turned out to be quite easy, without me needed to dismantle the shutter assembly completely. All I had was a jewel screwdriver, a pair of long nose pliers, and a plastic bottle lid to keep the screws in. In addition I used some eclipse cleaning liquid to clean the inner parts of the lens while I had it open. A more complete dismantling of the shutter would probably require a bit more equipment, and a lot more time. All in all, the operation took me 2 hours, though it shouldn’t take me longer than 20 minutes now that I know what to do.
First we had to get the front plate and focusing lens off. First I undid the plate screws (marked A), the top two turned out to be a bit longer than the bottom one. After than I needed to remove the two screws (marked B) that also acted as the close and far limits to the focusing lens.

The focusing lens was just screwed on, and with the limiting screws removed is was easily screwed off. Thankfully I made a note of where the focus arrow ended up when the lens was tightened fully. In this case it was ever so slightly past where the infinity limit was. Once off, we were able to remove the front plate.

With the front plate off we could now see the leavers and not much else. At first I couldn’t find the screw to remove it, but then discovered it by turning the f-stop leaver to f/22 (screw D). The shutter speed dial had a hole in it that looked like it was made for a screw, but none were found underneath. Once screw D was removed, the plate came off quite easily with the whole shutter mechanism and rear lens/aperture assembly.

The rear part of the lens has a light seal around it that prevents any light leakage into the camera box itself.

A more serious shutter problem would entail removing the three screws visible in the image above, an operation that would be a whole lot more tricky than what was done so far. Thankfully the shutter sticking in the open position was due to a lack of lubrication and an excess of dirt where the shutter opening arm met the shutter speed dial.

A small amount of lubricant dabbed on after I had cleaned the metal surface with a cotton bud, and the shutter was once again working perfectly (or at least appeared to be). Reassembly was pretty straight forward, just reversing all the steps up to that point. With one little issue. Once the face plate was back on I screwed the focusing lens on only to find it stop at a different point than when I took it off. This would definitely effect focusing, so I removed it, turned it about 180 degrees and then screwed it back on. This time it was fully tightened at the correct point, so all that remained was to screw the face plate screws in and the camera was as good as new (new being +- 70 years old).

(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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Tags: Cameras

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 9th, 2007 at 9:55 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.