what will you do if it breaks?
Same as I always do, fix it. If I can not fix it, I have two choices. The same two anyone has who is using and old item for which parts are no longer available.
1. Toss it out and get another camera. That is feasible with a camera that sell for less than a couple of hundred bucks.
2. Send to to a camera repair person who has a machine shop, and can make one off parts. Actually any camera repair shop that does not have that capability is not a camera repair shop, just some place where they can replace parts. Any real repair they have to send out to a real shop. The only thing such shops have over me is a source of parts, however as often as they send even a modern camera back with "Unrepairable, No Parts" stamped on the invoice, I am not sure they are as competent as I am.
I consider myself a camera "unfixer", that is I often unfix the things someone else has "fixed"*. I hope the camera I have bought has not been "fixed".
You do realize you have exactly the same choices if you buy a Kodak Medalist?
*To give you and example, when I bought my Crown Graphic it did not focus for crap. The dealer I bought it from sent it to his expert Graphic repair person, and it came back even worse. So I inspected it myself. The ground glass was in backward. The fresnel was on the wrong side of the ground glass. The infinity stops were set hard against the back of the camera, they are supposed to be set an 1/8" beyond infinity. He had changed the focus scale to one for a 127mm lens when the camera had a 135mm lens. He broke off the adjuster screw in the rangefinder that lined the images up with each other. In other words, every single thing that could be done wrong was done wrong. I guess that was why he was and expert, he really knew how to "fix" someone's camera.
I set everything to rights, and replaced the rangefinder with a military surplus, new, old stock one in that wonderful military long term packaging. You know where they figure they might need that part in a couple of hundred years and want to make sure it will be in perfect shape when the package is opened?
Then I found out the shutter had been "fixed", so I finally found a nice clean lens and shutter on eBay. That took two years, I am cheap, and the one I finally found was about 5 miles from here.
The results are that I have a camera that genuinely works as well as it did when it was brand new in 1952.
My only regret is that I do not have the funds to set up a tiny machine shop of my own. It is not even all that expensive, costs about the same as a pro digital SLR and lens.
