The Nikon F was never said to be weatherproof but it was. In my newspaper days I recall shooting a college football game in a driving rain in the afternoon and returning to the office where I removed prism and back from the cameras and put them in film drying cabinet to remove the rainwater. I then reassembled them and took them out that evening to shoot a football bowl game in a freezing cold rain with mud splashing everywhere. Then it was return to office where I repeated the same procedure and then brushed off the dried mud. Kept using those cameras for a couple more years until they were stolen. Never missed a lick. Nikonos? Don't need no stinkin' Nikonos....
The Nikonos wasn't particularly handy unless you were underwater with it. The original was, after all, little more than an interchangeable lens, scale focus camera that was specially pressure-sealed to be used submerged, when diving. I had one, briefly, in the middle 1980s. You had to lubricated the seals regularly, and replace them periodically, for the camera's sealing to remain intact to spec. I thought it would be useful to shoot with in rainy weather, but ended up using a Nikon F most of the time.
The Nikon F was not weather sealed but it did well when abused and used in environmentally nasty conditions. As you say, you could just take it all apart, blow it out with a hair dryer, put it back together, and keep on going. It was also a camera robustly constructed for easy service: a good Nikon tech can strip the whole thing down and have it all back together in a few hours. The Photomic meter heads were occasionally a little fragile and would show water damage now and then. I got my first Nikon F Photomic FTn when I was a sophomore in High School, when I was chief photographer in the school's student-operated Photo Staff. It was happily abused for the remaining three years of high school covering football games, baseball games, swim meets, class events, faculty and student portraits, whatever ... in every situation that happened along. Never missed a beat, got dunked in water via rain or just me dropping it when in the field a few times. When it got wet, I'd take it apart and dry it, go back out shooting a few hours later. I sold it sometime about five years after I graduated high school to a friend of mine who was doing photo-stringer work for the local newspaper. He used it for another decade. Just kept on going.
Over the years, I had a couple more of these cameras, most with the FTn head but a couple with a plain prism. I have another Nikon F plain prism now ... a very early one by the serial number. This one sat in a friend's basement, in an open box, with the lens missing for a decade or three. He gave it to me. I blew it out with an air can and it worked okay but the slow speed shutter timing train was very dirty, ran too slow. I handed it to a local repair tech who completely overhauled it: cleaned, lubricated, and adjusted everything. Most expensive service on an Nikon F I ever had to pay for ... about $175. That was a decade ago. It is fully functional and works perfectly today still.
My first two Leicas (a IIf and a IIc) suffered tons of use and abuse from my young self between 1969 and 1985. I lost one of them when I tripped on the temple of the sun in Mexico in 1977 and it fell out of my hands and bounced off the steps of the pyramid on its way to the ground below. The second was lost in '85 when I was trying to catch a photo of the antenna assembly that we'd just fixed in flight on a data capture mission for NASA/JPL over the Pacific Ocean ... It jounced out of my holster when the plane hit some turbulence and the open cargo door let it fly out of the plane (I had a safety line attached to me...). Both had been used in all situations, just like the NIkon F, and never missed a beat until their demise.
Weather sealing came into being as cameras become more electronically dependent. Sealing is good stuff, don't get me wrong ... both my Olympus E-1 and E-M1 are fully sealed as are their pro-grade lenses ... and it protects the sensitive electronics when in good condition. But of course what that means from a service and maintenance perspective is that the seals need to be replaced every few years or they lose the weather protection they afford. Same as the Nikonos. I can't get seals for the E-1 any more (no longer available, and the camera's 19 years old), but I've had the E-M1 seals replaced once now ... it's almost 10 years old (perhaps this fall or next...?).
I go out shooting in all kinds of weather, in all kinds of circumstances (like blowing sand/dust on the Black Rock Playa combined with 110-120°F temperatures). With any camera, I take due care to keep it from harm, but my interest is to make photographs and if I can't do that with a particular camera, well, the camera isn't really much use, is it? Regardless what a camera costs, or whether it has weather sealing or not, you can take care to protect it in use and keep it from being destroyed. This is just common sense.
And regardless what kind of sealing a camera has, if you abuse it sufficiently in bad circumstances, it will fail and be rendered to junk. This is also common sense.
G
