Stiff shutter dial on CLE

[Poptones]

Hi all, I recently picked up a pretty immaculate CLE from eBay but it has a stiff shutter dial. This makes exposure compensation pretty awkward. I'm fairly sure that this will be the result of lack of use given the fact this old camera looks new! I've tried rotating the dial back and two a fair bit to see if it will loosen, but no luck so far.

The seller has been decent enough to offer a return, but I'm wondering if this is something that I can fairly easily fix myself, or that any competent repair man could sort quickly and cheaply?

Any CLE owners out there experienced the same thing?

 

[Scrambler]

There are plenty of online (some hosted here) step-by-step guides to opening the CLE. I would then carefully clean the shutter dial, including the contacts while you have it open.

http://justinlow.com/articles/repair-minolta-cle is a good start.

 

[Vics]

My M3 came back from a repair once with a pretty stiff shutter dial, and when I asked about it the repairer told me that that was the way it should be. It has loosened up a bit since.

 

[Palaeoboy]

Not to sound condescending but just thought I would asked are you definitely pressing the silver button beside the shutter dial when going from Auto to any of the exposure compensation points? The locking mechanism associated with that can stick sometimes. If you are definitely doing that then my guess would be that the cameras lack of use has seen the lubricant in the dial mechanism may have started to coagulate and it acting like glue rather than easing friction. Although I have never seen that happening before on the dozens of CLEs I have handled as the need for lubricant on these cameras is minimal but if it hasnt been worked every few months thats when these types of problems begin to occur. A simple CLA should fix things up nicely again. Make sure everything else is working perfectly though, some other faults may not be able to be fixed with a simple CLA and best to send it back to the seller if thats the case.