Call: Please publish DIY repair reports and contribute to the continued existence of film!

[Andreas Thaler]

Every DIY repair report and every published experience with repair attempts count.


We have many posts here in the forum with questions about how something can be repaired, but only a few repair reports and tutorials.

That's a shame, because it means that expertise and specialist knowledge remain a private matter and others don't have it for their work.

Every DIY repair report and every published experience with repair attempts count, so that cameras and photo equipment for film now and in the future have a chance of being restored.

So please publish your work, even short reports with a few photos help others and contribute to keeping film alive!

Anyone who publishes their repair work benefits from feedback and has their work documented for later reference.

Writing repair reports: A simple, fun thing!

What are you doing right now? Just tell it to a friend! Writing texts is not for everyone. If it has to be done in public in front of an audience, many people put down their pencils. Worrying that the text won't be good enough and that you won't be well received can be a major obstacle to...

www.photrio.com

 

[forest bagger]

Hello Andreas,

the most repairs I do on "modern" lenses (which have much electronics in it) and "modern" cameras (DSLR, DSLM),
but sometimes I encounter an old lens (like a LEICA Summicron-R 1:2/90 today) which has only simple problems.
Tomorrow I'll post that.

 

[Andreas Thaler]

Hello Andreas,

the most repairs I do on "modern" lenses (which have much electronics in it) and "modern" cameras (DSLR, DSLM),
but sometimes I encounter an old lens (like a LEICA Summicron-R 1:2/90 today) which has only simple problems.
Tomorrow I'll post that.

Great Michael!

 

[Tel]

Andreas,

I’m impressed by your dedication and the quality of your repair postings; please keep up the good work. I first tried my hand at repairs when Ken Ruth stopped doing repairs of Rollei Baby cameras, beginning a trip down a dark and narrow rabbit-hole that I don’t recommend to others. On the positive side, I discovered that working on Nikon F2s was a comparatively simple thing and for that I found Richard Haw’s website and Robin Guymer’s posts here to be immensely helpful. Haw’s instructions for Nikon S2 repair are also excellent and I’ve had some fun working on those. For shutter repair, I found Chris Sherlock’s videos to be most helpful, even though I never worked on the cameras he did—his approach to the process and careful documentation of his methods are transferrable to other things and should serve as a useful introduction to repairs for anyone.

Some friends have suggested that I should make videos or photo-essays when I work on a camera, but that would required that I set up my workbench with camera gear and seriously slow me down—but only provide duplication of information that’s already available on the web. I’m not interested in electronics and have no desire to go that route, so my F2s are the newest cameras I’ll ever work on. So you won’t see any new posts about camera repair from me, but I still appreciate your efforts to keep the practice alive and document what you can.

 

[Andreas Thaler]

I’m not interested in electronics and have no desire to go that route, so my F2s are the newest cameras I’ll ever work on. So you won’t see any new posts about camera repair from me, but I still appreciate your efforts to keep the practice alive and document what you can.

Thank you!

However, starting with the DP-2, there is already a lot of electronics in the Photomic finders for the F2. How do you cope with that?

 

[Tel]

Thank you!

However, starting with the DP-2, there is already a lot of electronics in the Photomic finders for the F2. How do you cope with that?

Easy, I meter as I was taught 50 years ago—off camera.

 

[Sirius Glass]

They are interesting, but at this point I would rather have a repair person do the work with a guarantee.

 

[Andreas Thaler]

Let's tell it like it is.

The manufacturers no longer offer service for their old products or no longer exist.

The technicians who learned to repair certain photo equipment from the manufacturer or trained as repairers are retiring or leaving this world. With them, their knowledge and experience are also gone.

If we want to continue to repair our old photo equipment tomorrow, we have to take care of it today. And the best way to do that is to take action ourselves and encourage others to do the same.

Someone somewhere will always be offering repairs and service, but with what capacity and at what price?

As we can see here, many of the common repairs can be done by yourself. So why wait and then pay a lot of money, or wait in vain one day for someone who doesn't come?

One of the reasons I describe repairs in detail here, including the tools used, is to show that you don't need to be an engineer or have any special talent to do them.

Many attempts at repairs are stopped by the fear that you won't be able to do it because A, B, C …

You have to overcome that to realize that it is possible with some practice and concentration.

And if we report on what we do - no matter what the outcome - others might pick up the ball and continue working on the topic.

That's a good prospect, isn't it?

 

[ic-racer]

Personally I think the 'repair' forum should have two sections. One where people can ask the usual question "why does my camera not ____ (fill in the blank)." With another section that concentrates 'how to do it' repair threads.

 

[Andreas Thaler]

Personally I think the 'repair' forum should have two sections. One where people can ask the usual question "why does my camera not ____ (fill in the blank)." With another section that concentrates 'how to do it' repair threads.

What would be the advantage?

 

[MFstooges]

I like what you are doing.
What makes me sad is that lots of valuable information from people in the 80s & 90s became inaccessible as soon as they pass away and nobody cares or would spend time and money to extend the internet hosting.

 

[Andreas Thaler]

It is also up to us here to decide what repair options for photo equipment look like today and tomorrow. Every contribution counts!

I will definitely continue as long as I can do useful work.

It is easy for me, as I have now made working with film photo technology, its use and DIY repairs my life's work. So there will be a lot more to read here

 

[vandergus]

I've been using iFixit lately to create repair guides. I did youtube for a little bit, but it was just so much work. At least to make a video with the quality I wanted. iFixit is much easier and still provides a ton of information. It's a purpose built platform so it's literally designed to make detailed step-by-step guides and has a ton of useful features. Some examples...

- Homepage for the product to act as a jumping off point
- Document storage
- A troubleshooting wiki for listing common failures
- Different guide formats so, for example, you can make a "Technique" guide to show how to calibrate a light meter
- Use of prerequisite guides that can be reused to speed up guide creation
- Comments on guide pages so users can ask questions
- Guides are open to the public for editing so they are essentially living documents that can be updated and improved
- Nice mobile formatting
- Guides can be downloaded as pdfs for offline viewing or long term storage

It just makes a lot of sense to use a place like this. Here are some cameras I've been working on lately.

Pentax ME super
Pentax Spotmatic (a little newer and still under construction)

 

[4season]

If the information is worth preserving, please don't rely on any forum as the only means of archiving, because that's not what forum software is designed for. Consider keeping an original in a popular format which can be edited, and distributing copies as PDFs as needed.

 

[ic-racer]

What would be the advantage?

Organizational mostly.

 

[Andreas Thaler]

Pentax ME super
Pentax Spotmatic (a little newer and still under construction)

Excellent work!

 

[Andreas Thaler]

I like what you are doing.
What makes me sad is that lots of valuable information from people in the 80s & 90s became inaccessible as soon as they pass away and nobody cares or would spend time and money to extend the internet hosting.

Always worth a try:

Wayback Machine

web.archive.org

 

[forest bagger]

Hello Andreas,

on Friday I wrote about a LEICA Summicron-R 1:2/90 which looked like having a simple problem. Now I know better:

I received a Leica Summicron-R 1:2/90 for repair, whose focus setting is not correct.

This is actually a very simple job - you unscrew the outer front tube with the lens hood from the lens tube, then use a long screwdriver to loosen the four fixing screws on the clamping ring, turn the lens tube until the focus is in place, and tighten the screws again:

However, it was not possible to unscrew the tube with the lens hood using the usual tools (rubber stopper or piece of tube with rubber edge) because the tube was extremely tight and the friction of the rubber was not enough to loosen it.
So I had to disassemble the lens from the back and remove the lens hood from the outer front barrel in order to unscrew the front barrel from the lens barrel using two oil filter wrenches (rubber-coated textile strap with a lashing handle).

Then I reassembled the lens except for the outer front tube and glued the stop ring back to the lens hood.

Now the focus adjustment, as described above, was no longer a problem.
After that, all that was needed was to screw the outer front tube with the lens hood back on.

I have obscured the serial number of the lens shown here because it is a customer lens.

 

[Andreas Thaler]

@forest bagger

Wonderful!