Camera/Lens Restorations
Is There Anything I don't Buy Broken
I have restored quite a few lenses & cameras now. But i have only recently been documenting restoring them. They are usually a fairly simple process with the only difficulty being it is quite a fiddly process due to the small size of some of the cameras & optics. In meany ways just taking a camera lens or camera apart is an engaging puzzle in its self.
A surprisingly nice zoom & macro lens, OK nothing on my Fuji macro but it is my only way of doing macro on film. I will have to do macro on Cinistill 800T at some point. Anyway while the lens was in physically good condition it had suffered from the classic problem with vintage lenses I have fixed meany times. Lens fungus, but annoyingly it was between lens elements that required dismantling the whole lens assembly to get to. This did give me an opportunity to service the whole camera lens though.
I got this lens at a car boot sail for a tenner. It was the last day at closing time because me & my partner are terrible at getting up in the morning. Ether way the lens was in good condition despite being a little dirty. It had some complementary lens fungus which is what I am going to fix here. Also got hold of another vintage camera.
These are classics of cameras. There are quite a few variance of these. I have a second one that takes portrait aspect on medium format film. This one also uses medium format film. This one just had some jammed mechanics as the old lube that would have been put in in WWII has dried out. Needed re-lubing & lube cleaned of the shutter & iris mechanism.
Was an easy but very fiddly repair.
I bought one of these a good while back during COVID, I did some basic TLC as not everything was 100%, was not cheap ether as these cameras are worth a few bob. But as I used it I spotted a few issues that I had not fixed. So time to fix the issues. This camera is a complete mongrel to work on, it's a pain to take apart & get back together. Only do the repairs if you are good at such things.
The issues were; gummy aperture, lower shutter speeds sticking & light seals on the film backs have failed.
These are highly regarded range finder cameras from the 60s. I technically own two although one is a parts unit now. This is a quest to get a working one that started in 2016. I got hold of the GS model, but it had shutter issues, probably due to the pad of death, in trying to fix it I fucked it up further. So I got an original model & tried to fix that, who know it would take several years to actually complete the repair & a count less amount of times taking the thing apart.