miket-nyc
Newbie
I recently bought a CL with a working meter at an attractive price on ebay, but the seller admitted that the rangefinder image was "very faint" and gave me a discount. Looking in the small rangefinder window in the front, I see what looks like a piece of cotton batten in the light path (but the image is still there and still focuses correctly if I'm in bright enough light to see it)
I took the top cover off, hoping a puff of canned air could dislodge of it. (That worked for me recently with an M 2 so it was worth a try). But this is more serious. The blockage doesn’t move when I press the rangefinder coupling arm, so it's not in the moving element of the rangefinder but in the middle section. The beamsplitter mirror is in perfect shape.
I'm also in a quandary because I used to repair Leicas for a living in the '80s and still do it for fun, so part of me feels I ought to be able to repair this myself. But in camera bodies I worked almost exclusively on screw mount and M-series Leicas, with an occasional early Leicaflex. I never faced a camera like this, with its extremely tightly packed body and a meter movement sitting on top of the rangefinder.
I have Leitz's official repair manual for the CL which is cryptic as usual, and also the SPT article on the CL and Thomas Tomosy's Leica Camera Repair Handbook. These aren't particularly helpful. Tomosi's book just says "the meter movement is held by two screws and can be removed without any trouble" and the rangefinder under it is held with three screws.
But a larger issue is that I'm retired, and have no plans to start repairing CLs other than this one, so I will probably just send it to a good professional who specializes in these cameras. Can anyone give me some inkling what's wrong with this rangefinder and recommend someone to fix it?
Mike Taglieri
I took the top cover off, hoping a puff of canned air could dislodge of it. (That worked for me recently with an M 2 so it was worth a try). But this is more serious. The blockage doesn’t move when I press the rangefinder coupling arm, so it's not in the moving element of the rangefinder but in the middle section. The beamsplitter mirror is in perfect shape.
I'm also in a quandary because I used to repair Leicas for a living in the '80s and still do it for fun, so part of me feels I ought to be able to repair this myself. But in camera bodies I worked almost exclusively on screw mount and M-series Leicas, with an occasional early Leicaflex. I never faced a camera like this, with its extremely tightly packed body and a meter movement sitting on top of the rangefinder.
I have Leitz's official repair manual for the CL which is cryptic as usual, and also the SPT article on the CL and Thomas Tomosy's Leica Camera Repair Handbook. These aren't particularly helpful. Tomosi's book just says "the meter movement is held by two screws and can be removed without any trouble" and the rangefinder under it is held with three screws.
But a larger issue is that I'm retired, and have no plans to start repairing CLs other than this one, so I will probably just send it to a good professional who specializes in these cameras. Can anyone give me some inkling what's wrong with this rangefinder and recommend someone to fix it?
Mike Taglieri
dagcamera.com
rfaspen
[insert pithy phrase here]
Don (DAG) is the first to come to mind.