GSW670III wind gear design flaw FYI

[tetrisattack]

Man, these cameras! Beautiful lenses, great, simple styling, but they might as well be made out of balsa wood.

My school has 3 Fujifilm GSW670III cameras for student checkout and two of them are on the shelf for repair. Apparently there's a gear made of cheap white plastic that's prone to failure. Though the gear is part of the frame counter assembly, the shutter will no longer cock when it fails, so it's a necessary part of the winding mechanism.

We're taking the gear from the last working fuji down to a machine shop today to see if we can get a metal one fabricated.

I guess I'm looking to hear from anybody else who's had this part fail on their camera, and I plan to follow this up with a note if we can get the gear successfully fabricated, so that it can become part of the RFF knowledge base.

 

[Abbazz]

The frame counter is one of the three reasons that make me prefer the old G690/GL690/GM670 to the more recent GW690/GSW690/GW670 (the two other reasons being the interchangeable lens and the real "B" setting on the shutter). The plastic gears linking this counter to the shutter assembly make it very noisy and very prone to breakage. Some photographers have this counter permanently disabled.

Cheers,

Abbazz

 

[Meleica]

do we think the first and second versions of the GW/GSW cameras used a plastic or metal gear ?

Thanks
Dan
Fuji 6x45 and Fuji 6x7, 6x9 Pages

http://members.aol.com/dcolucci/fuji670.htm

http://members.aol.com/dcolucci/fujirf.htm

 

[Solinar]

I don't know whether the GW and GW II series is any different, but I do run a student lab at a large university and as group they are very hard on equipment.