Yashica Electro 35
The first issue with the camera is a known issue they have. It is called "The Pad Of Death", s little rubber pad that was responsible for critical spacing that allowed the shutter to fire & the light meter to activate properly. I used rubber from a bike inner-tube to replace the original rubber that had turned to gunk over the decades.
The next issue was the light meter did not work, it would only fire the high speeds & not react to the ambient light, I looked for a service manual & schematic which I found online
The replacement transistor on the ceramic hybrid with the original unreliable 60s transistors. This operation was not a success, despite having the original service manual for guidance & the systematic so i knew what each part did.
Since I had a buggered GS version I decided to use the service manual to tell me where all the wires went between the versions, to my luck the original "brain" used the same pin-out as the GS "brain" apart from one pin which I just used rules of elimination to figure out where it would go. So I preformed the swap successfully after meany hours & the light metering & shutter were working as they should be. After some testing, the original Electro 35 was upgraded from 500 ISO max to 1000 ISO max.
So the next issue that would be the one to take a few years to fix was the focus ring was stuck & miss aligned. So the whole camera has to come apart as you can't get to that part of the lens from the front, believe me I tried. So I poped the top.
Looking at the back you can see the control electronics & how the rangefinder mechanism works. Amazing this can be done fully analog with no electronics. You can also see how simple the film counter is.
With some careful levering I was able to free the front section with the lens & electronics attached with minimal wires breaking.Luckily I have a photographic memory so figured out where they went.
This one part lead to me taking the camera completely apart at least five times to try & fix this part alone. The trick to it was the alignment of the helical screw that holds the lens to the body was critical. I used my broken GS to figure it out as the focus on that camera was the one thing that still worked.
The next part that had me foxed was the actual ring you twist, the external ring does not rotate 360 degrees, which was to be expected, however the internal ring also did not rotate 360 degrees & was really stiff. So I lubed it all up to some success, it un-jammed. I then had to align the section of the inner ring with the outer focus ring & re-tighten the grub screws to lock them together. I then assembled the camera. The last part was the set the camera to infinity focus, it was slightly off. So I undid the grub screws & moved the focus ring back a bit & re-tightened them. I then twisted the focus ring until the two images of houses in the distance were lined up. I then adjusted the outer ring to be set to infinity & the camera was finally fixed.
My original Yashica Electro 35 GS. Sitting in bits. The parts I salvaged from it to fix its older brother were, the light meter electronics, all the light bulbs & the focus ring nubs so I would have more grip when focusing as it is still a little stiff.
The Yashica Electro 35 in all its finally working glory, from the outside looks the same as when it was broken. But I assure you it now works.
First test shots taken on Bulk Loaded Kentmere Pan 100 show the focus was way off & focuses to far forward. One observation to make is at least at f1.7 this lens is not sharp, this could also be because I have had to take the camera apart several times & may have misaligned something. In my defense I have repaired meany lenses & never fucked up the alignment. So contrary to popular belief I would say the lens is quite soft. Only got three photos from this test due to a developing error.
So first order of business was to adjust the lens, I did that by sticking some diffuser materiel from an old LCD monitor to the camera & setting the camera to Bulb mode. I then used a shutter release cable & a tripod for lights to focus on some street lamps outside my house. Once I had that sorted I then undid the grub screws & set the outer focus ring to infinity.
The next part was to set the rangefinder correctly. This was done by the cross headed screw in the picture. The annoying part is as you adjust the screw the tool will block the range finder from working so there is some guess work.
End result was some images I am quite happy with.
