Beemermark
Veteran
As a Mechanical Engineer with a very good electronic background, I can assure you it is far easier, cheaper and faster to create a reversed engineered electronic board then a gear.
Bob Michaels
nobody special
The ContaxG is a classic example as it has almost no mechanics. No focusing helicoid, no film wind, no film rewind, no rangefinder. Everything is done by peizo motors. I was not the first owner and used both of mine hard for 8-9 years with no problems. I believe they are still going strong with their new owners.
Bonus is that there is nothing to Clean, nothing to Lubricate, nothing to Adjust.
StillKicking
Established
In the end (just like watches, vintage aircraft and old cars) once something has been out of manufacture for a while original parts become scarce. For popular models there will always be after market suppliers who will provide parts and labour. The challenge comes with the specialist or more niche market equipment... it is surprisingly easy to get parts for a Blower Bentley from the 1930's but almost impossible to get parts for a 1980's DeLorean. The same is true for the Leica M3 but the M5 is another story. It will be a bit of a lottery.. Sadly I think my Hexar RF will be one of casualties.. my Leica M3 on the other hand.. I wouldn't be surprised if my grand children will be using it long after I have taken the dirt nap.
dreilly
Chillin' in Geneva
Mark, I had one. Steve Choi tried for over a year to find a spare part and couldn't. Sometimes the AE setting would work, sometimes it would fire at the wrong speed, sometimes it didn't fire at all. The problem was intermittent. I have a long series of emails between Steve (who is wonderful) and myself about the issue as documentation. Great little camera, I occasionally look at them on ebay, then I remember that experience, shudder, and move on.
dreilly
Chillin' in Geneva
I'm not sure this is true. An electronic engineer I know told me recently that some circuits really can't easily be reverse engineered, and to give another example, when Vixen telescopes in Japan lost the electrical engineer that designed their excellent Sky Sensor PC mount navigation system, they had to design the follow-on system from scratch. (It wasn't as good.) The designer didn't leave schematics behind (I guess) and apparently reverse engineering the circuits was either cost or time prohibitive, or both.
Between this and global warming (or is it climate change) I'm not sure I can get up in the morning.
RE can be trivial, or difficult. Like everything, it depends.
I spent many a year reverse engineering Apple CPU boards. Well, not me personally...my company. At one point we reversed various Mac boot ROMs, in order to write our own firmware. It wasn't trivial in the least and we obviously got ZERO support from the mother ship. Takes patience and talent.
benlees
Well-known
So let me get this straight: You have an rf645 and a Mamiya 6 and you are worried about potential problems?? Just use 'em!
sanmich
Veteran
The interesting part is that there are several skies competing.
seriously, I don't even know what will happen faster: the end of film, or the end of good repair people.
I do limit my choice of camera to ones that seem relatively reliable, and as Harry Lime mentioned, more likely to be repaired by the companies.
That's the reason I don't buy a Konica RF for example (mostly no parts, and some early ones with a defective, unrepairable RF, turning them into the proverbial paperweight)
And I really think a good repair IS some kind of rocket science.
I had quite a lot of jobs from very reputable repair persons that needed a re-do, and some CLA's that were really messed up from people I won't use again...
IMHO re-machining a special part for a camera is also, in all but the simplest cases, an illusion. Donor bodies is what I think, the future of camera repairs.