......and it ended up in a baggie, Tell Us Your Worst “Repair” Stories

Ambro51

Ambro51

Collector/Photographer
Local time
7:50 AM
Joined
Jan 4, 2016
Messages
689
i think everyone here has attempted, and failed....miserably. Sometimes....the dreaded bottom drawer. Tell us what you’ve “fixed beyond repair”.
 
One of these... Agfa Compact.

Let a friend borrow it for an overseas trip and I think it took a swim. Have it in pieces in a baggie somewhere and will attempt to re-assemble one of these days.


 
I attempted to re-lube an old R50/1.8 lens for the Canonflex. Double helical design. The lens came apart easily, but I forgot to mark the start point for helical on the lens barrel. I've spent hours trying to find the correct start point, all to no avail. The lens is now sitting in pieces on my work desk.

Jim B.
 
Nikkor 28mm 2.8 AIs with oil on the aperture blades but otherwise great. Only had a pointed spanner, needed a flat one. Slipped, deep scratch on the front element. Put it back, another scratch. Gave it away for $10.
 
Mackinaw said:
I attempted to re-lube an old R50/1.8 lens for the Canonflex. Double helical design. The lens came apart easily, but I forgot to mark the start point for helical on the lens barrel. I've spent hours trying to find the correct start point, all to no avail. The lens is now sitting in pieces on my work desk.

Jim B.
Click to expand...

I did the same with a Mir 26B, but after leaving it a few weeks managed to get it back together, only somehow rotated 180 degrees so the distance scale doesn't line up at all. Works well enough for my purpose and some of those brass screws aren't going to take much more wear, so it will stay that way for the foreseeable future.

My absolute worst was a camera I tried to replace the internal battery on, which meant dismantling the camera. There were delicate ribbon cables only just long enough to do the work. I was aware of this having watched a video. Needless to say I got the old battery out, and got the new one in, then decided to it could be a bit further one way or the other. Eased it out again, then it slipped from my fingers through the gap in the casing and tore the ribbon cable in two. After pondering the likely success rate and cost of further repairs I sold the camera as spares/repair for about a tenth of what I had paid.
 
It did eventually end well, thanks to Hans Kerensky's help, and making a special tool from Ni-Ag wire, but removing the main spring from a Prontor shutter came close to seeing me taken off in a green ambulance. It took me *days* to get the bloody thing back in right! And the number of different parts of the room I had to retrieve it from, as well...
 
In the 1970's my brother tried to repair a malfunctioning lens for a Petri 35mm SLR. He was unable to do so.
When he brought it in pieces to the Petri repair shop they remarked they had never seen one taken that far apart.

Chris
 
I have an Agfa Silette folder that I've never been able to get the helical out of, so it just sits on the shelf. Older folder cameras are hard to fix the shutters if you don't have the correct parts as there were so many variations of the Compur type shutters, even in the same camera model from year to year. I opened one shutter to find that a previous "repair person" had taken one of the springs and wrapped it around the lever it was attached to. Then when I unwound the spring it broke off the lever. It was such an old camera that I never did find a part to fix it. Had to put a somewhat newer shutter on it (if you can call a 1936 model "newer"). There are about a half dozen cameras around here that I've given up on, and I sometimes scavenge them for parts, like my motor drive Nikon F that was a mish-mash of worn out parts when I got it.

PF
 
I had bought a Contax T for cheap that was pretty beat up. It worked fine for a little while. Eventually the top cover started coming loose. The chassis is made out of plastic and one of the parts that the cover screwed to was broken / chewed up by the screw that fit there to hold the cover on. I tried to fix it using some epoxy - it worked for a while, but not well enough. Eventually it broke again and while trying to figure out how to fix it another plastic part broke off the back under where the wind lever sits.

Too bad, I really liked that camera. Sometimes you just wonder, why couldn't they just built it a LITTLE bit better?

The other one i wish was built better is that Rollei XF35. What a piece of work that thing is. What is going on with that cheap battery cover??

I gave up on "modern" compacts and now I use a Leica IIIC to cover that gap. Except for an Olympus XA I still have which works great.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom