An evening with Youxin Ye

[dfoo]

I'm quite fluent in Mandarin, and my wife is Chinese too 🙂 I don't want to get into the fine points of pinyin, but in my opinion "hs" to the vast majority of English speakers does not make sense (nor does it lead to anything that sounds close to the x sound in Mandarin) whereas a "sh" sound does.

Likely his surname is 叶, which in Mandarin is not pronounced anything like "yuh" (its yeah, as I previously said).

 

[lic4]

My bad about "yuh"

I'm quite fluent in Mandarin, and my wife is Chinese too 🙂 I don't want to get into the fine points of pinyin, but in my opinion "hs" to the vast majority of English speakers does not make sense (nor does it lead to anything that sounds close to the x sound in Mandarin) whereas a "sh" sound does.

Likely his surname is 叶, which in Mandarin is not pronounced anything like "yuh" (its yeah, as I previously said).

 

[Pirate]

Can we just call him Bob? 😀

 

[sienarot]

Another vote of confidence for Youxin here. I bought a user M3 DS from him a while back. The thing was silky smooth and smelled like it was just worked on (had that oily, varnish smell still). The guy is a master of his art. Anyone looking to buy user Ms should contact him directly to see if he has any in stock.

 

[Leica All Day]

Youxin Ye is cool.....cheers, michael

 

[raydm6]

I'm also fortunate to be about an hours drive from Youxin. Been to his home a few times. A very nice man.

 

[ederek]

I too have had the pleasure of working with Youxin at his home on several occasions.

While a CLA is nice, it is the tricky repair jobs that also stand out. Here are a couple examples from yesterday - my M's are back to perfect function now!

1) slipping shutter winder.

Youxin CLA'd my first M4 a couple years back, but we couldn't figure out a problem with the winding assembly. Every few winds it would advance the film just a tad further than normal with the winder lever traveling just a bit too much. Looked at it a year ago while doing a CLA on different M - not quite there yet. Some time ago Youxin spoke with me and said he had it figured out..

Ahh, the culprit, a part buried deep in the winding assembly:

[M9, 75/1.4 lux - in-camera jpeg]

..and success!! - smooth and perfect winding every time. I must say, reassembly was quite tricky, involving a fairly complex sequence of cocking shutter, partial assembly, firing shutter, tightening, winding, rotating - the winder is like a little puzzle.

2) My second M4 was out of commission, having bumped a prism loose - aahhh!

Luckily it was the middle prism, the easiest to fix:

While the UV optical glue cured, Youxin shared a bit more about the fine points of viewfinder alignment, and how even out of the factory there is some variation if you know what to look for.

btw - it would seem word of his planned departure for the China Leica Exhibition is out, and quite a few units are being sent for CLA, so don't delay..

I think he is still accepting image submissions for the Exhibition for the next week or two, so if anyone wants to send along entries, I'd contact him soon. Not sure of the selection process, but it covers the early days to today.

 

[bigeye]

One Saturday this winter, my IIIf's shutter got the 'slows' in the cold. I shipped it to him on Monday and had it back by Friday, all slicked up and ready to go. Highly recommended.

-Charlie