help! How to dismount a Zenit?

[spiderfrank]

Ok , I know it's not a glorious rangefinder camera, but it's a cute nice old machine...
I found, for 12 euros, a nice Zenit EM: it had a slow second curtain but I fixed it quite easily (i hope 🙄), and now it's in working order, but there is an ugly vertical row of dust into the finder: I think it's caused by dust at the top edge of the prism, so I want to open the top cover, and try to clean it. I'm searching for a tutorial to dismount the cover, but i cannot find anything, can you help me?

Thank you

Franco

 

[Joao]

Franco, removing the top is easy, to find detailed illustrated instructions you have to enter the Tiger's Lair
http://www.xs4all.nl/~tomtiger/
Scroll left side column until you find the Zenit Repair Project, you have there what you want.
BTW, the vertical stripe is caused by the loss of the silvering of the pentaprism. You have to replace the pentaprism (theoretically you may have it re-silvered, but this may be very expensive). When you remove the cover, take the oportunity to replace the decaying foam above the prism before it causes further damage.
Feel free to ask for further details, I have been inside a couple of Zenits before .
Cheers
Joao

 

[spiderfrank]

Thank you very much, Joao!
Re-silvering the prism is "out of budget", I guess ;-) , but perhaps I could ask a friend who own an older Zenit camera to give me its prism, and make one good camera from the two. Of course I'll give him the repaired one...
A nice working camera from an ugly working one and a nice bad one 😉

Ciao
Franco

 

[pvdhaar]

I had a Zenit E (long time ago) that had a thin straight vertical line smack in the middle of the viewfinder as well. I never took the effort to find out what it was all about, as it didn't stop me taking pictures. But now that the issue comes up here, I wonder whether it really had a prism, and not a pentamirror where you saw the edges of two mirrors touching..

 

[Joao]

Hello
All Zenits of the E family (including some of their ancestors) have prisms. I have attached a picture with one prism with severely damaged silvering (A), another seemingly looking fine (B) but with some damage - the vertical line is there when looking through it.... Some brownish discoloration just below the letter B is the result of the decaying foam. The metal bridge C covers the prism with the foam between them. When replacing the foam I use to place a bit of kitchen aluminium foil under the foam (between the foam and the prism). This way if the foam melts, it will not cause further damage to the silvering.
Good luck
Joao