What just came back from repair?

[Miles.]

We already have a very active and fun thread titled “What have you just bought?”

…Which inspired me to start this thread — what just came back from repair?

Post a photo (if you want) and share a bit about the experience.

I’ll start:

A few months back I purchased a collapsible Leica Summicron 5cm f2 LTM lens that had the typical Brillo pad front element.

I sent it to Kanto Camera in Japan where they replaced the front element with a remanufactured one, re-coated a different element where the coating was just starting to fail, along with the other general CLA things. Price was $425 USD and it took 4-months.

 

[seany65]

That repair cost seems like good value, especially when a repair company wanted to charge me about £350 just to check the shutter on my Alitssa Altix III.

 

[Out to Lunch]

I did. I'll spare you the details.

 

[shawn]

Back from camerawiz. Shutter speed ring was very stiff. Frank fixed that, cleaned the optics and cleaned the shutter and shutter magnets. $160 which included return shipping.

Just sent him a GS645W to overhaul. Quoted price is $175.

 

[DownUnder]

You all are fortunate to have good, honest, reliable repair centres. In Australia, there may be one or two, but, well.

A cautionary tale. From Melbourne.

Not so long ago, $400+ to replace a Nikon SD slot with an interior made in China part the shop happened to have in stock. They had just finished charging someone $150 to replace the battery cover on a Nikon D7100. Tthe customer was complaining at the counter about the price when I walked in, but the owner was unbending and got paid.

Being me I negotiated down the repair price by $100, rightly suspecting that it was late afternoon on a Friday, the cash paying customers were few and the work load was quiet, so the owner maybe wanted a little fast cash to go clubbing or pubbing or whatever. The job took the techo all of fifteen minutes to do.

The slot broke down two weeks later and had to be replaced with a true-blue Nikon part, which the shop then wanted to charge me $200+ for...

In Australia some of the repair centres see the suckers coming. I wasn't one.

The 'suggestion' that a certain state government would be looking into the matter, saw the second bill disappear as if nuclear-nuked.

Lesson learned. Never again. I now have all my repairs done in Asia. Not everyone can do this, but I can. My Singapore repair person told me a Nikon SD slot replacement there would cost about $140.

So go figure. PT Barnum had us camera nutters all figured out.

 

[Retro-Grouch]

Fortunately, nothing. Knock wood! During the pandemic, I used a chunk of the stimulus checks to get CLA's for everything, and picked up some new trinkets as well. So now everything works well and, hopefully, will continue to do so for a good long time, maybe longer than I'll be around!

 

[Vince Lupo]

Nothing back from repair but two things sent out for repair: My Leica IIIa Spécialités Tiranty was sent to my local repair fellow for a CLA and to have its beam splitter replaced, and one of my Hasselblad 1000fs was sent to Jim Kilroy to see why the shutter isn’t tripped when I press the shutter release button (the mirror goes up but nothing happens to the shutter). One of my early (1951) Hasselblad ‘12’ backs just developed an advance issue and another ‘12’ back (1957) needs to have its seals replaced. Seems a good idea to have multiple Hasselblad film backs!

Edit — just realized that the back with the advance issue doesn’t have an advance issue. I remembered that I was using an early back with a 500C, which doesn’t work. I put that back on one my 1000fs and it worked fine. Ah well, good news and lesson learned.

 

[p.giannakis]

Youse all are so fortunate to have good, honest, reliable repair centres. In Australia, there may be one or two, but, well.

If there is a "Photographic hair-raising stories" thread, there will be plenty of botched repair stories in there. I personally have two repairman blacklisted due to previous experience.

I just sent the Pancolar to Luton Cameras for a service. Dry lubrication and sticky aperture mechanism, they quoted me £45 which honestly is as cheap as it gets. The Pancolar is not an easy lens to take apart. My experience with them has been always very positive - they know their stuff. I'll report back when I receive it.

 

[Leon C]

If there is a "Photographic hair-raising stories" thread, there will be plenty of botched repair stories in there. I personally have two repairman blacklisted due to previous experience.

I just sent the Pancolar to Luton Cameras for a service. Dry lubrication and sticky aperture mechanism, they quoted me £45 which honestly is as cheap as it gets. The Pancolar is not an easy lens to take apart. My experience with them has been always very positive - they know their stuff. I'll report back when I receive it.

Please keep us updated, from what I've read recently around the www, some of the better techs in the UK are retiring, I don't mind doing some smaller jobs myself, fungus etc but with Nikon some of the lenses can be tricky.

 

[Talus]

We already have a very active and fun thread titled “What have you just bought?”

…Which inspired me to start this thread — what just came back from repair?

Post a photo (if you want) and share a bit about the experience.

I’ll start:

A few months back I purchased a collapsible Leica Summicron 5cm f2 LTM lens that had the typical Brillo pad front element.

I sent it to Kanto Camera in Japan where they replaced the front element with a remanufactured one, re-coated a different element where the coating was just starting to fail, along with the other general CLA things. Price was $425 USD and it took 4-months.

View attachment 4859465

Great idea for a thread. I wish I had known about this. I got one of those lenses 10 years ago for about $150 and it was pretty unusable. Glass was horrible. If I had known it was fixable wouldn't have sold it last year for a couple hundred bucks. It sat in my drawer for a decade.

 

[Godfrey]

I await the return of my Makina 67 from service. Soon, I think.

Once that's back, I'll likely send out another camera for service and repair. I don't like to have more than one or two out for repair at any given time, and my primary users are all serviced within the past five to seven years now.

G

 

[wjlapier]

It’s been back a short while. My CL’s rangefinder was off. And I wanted the camera to accept a modern battery. Don at DAG did his usual excellent work on this one.

 

[ellisson]

I brought a Rollei Rolleiflex SL66E camera to Authorized Camera Repair, a local repair shop that I've used before in Willow Grove, PA, just outside of Philadelphia. The mirror got stuck and the film advance mechanism and shutter speed dial got jammed during shipping to a buyer in Southern California. I first tried emailing a repair person located in Frankfurt Germany who helped years a go with another of my Rollei cameras, but I never heard back. So the local shop did the repair work and a CLA on my SL66E. Having it operate normally after all repair work was worth the $345.

 

[Miles.]

I brought a Rollei Rolleiflex SL66E camera to Authorized Camera Repair, a local repair shop that I've used before in Willow Grove, PA, just outside of Philadelphia. The mirror got stuck and the film advance mechanism and shutter speed dial got jammed during shipping to a buyer in Southern California. I first tried emailing a repair person located in Frankfurt Germany who helped years a go with another of my Rollei cameras, but I never heard back. So the local shop did the repair work and a CLA on my SL66E. Having it operate normally after all repair work was worth the $345.

Nice! That's a tricky camera to have repaired.

 

[Tim Murphy]

I brought a Rollei Rolleiflex SL66E camera to Authorized Camera Repair, a local repair shop that I've used before in Willow Grove, PA, just outside of Philadelphia. The mirror got stuck and the film advance mechanism and shutter speed dial got jammed during shipping to a buyer in Southern California. I first tried emailing a repair person located in Frankfurt Germany who helped years a go with another of my Rollei cameras, but I never heard back. So the local shop did the repair work and a CLA on my SL66E. Having it operate normally after all repair work was worth the $345.

Dear ellison,

Thats great to hear! I dealt with Authorized Camera Repair once. He did an awesome job repairing a Nikon 5.8 cm f1.4 S lens that was my grandfather's. The aperture was weepy and had hazed the internal elements. I've tried to do more business with them several times but to their credit, they have quoted me prices which seemed very fair and stated that unless the items had significant personal value there really was no point in repairing them, as I would never likely recover the cost of the repairs.

That kind of honestly is refreshing. I have some time off over Easter weekend and I may take a drive to see him. He's quoted me a price for refurbishing a Yashica D but said he'd rather get a look at it before he went ahead with the reconditioning. We will see what happens.

Regards,

Tim Murphy

Harrisburg PA 🙂

 

[DownUnder]

Dear ellison,

Thats great to hear! I dealt with Authorized Camera Repair once. ... That kind of honestly is refreshing. I have some time off over Easter weekend and I may take a drive to see him. He's quoted me a price for refurbishing a Yashica D but said he'd rather get a look at it before he went ahead with the reconditioning. We will see what happens.

Regards,

Tim Murphy

Harrisburg PA 🙂

The Yashica D is a greatly underrated camera. Mine earned me enough to put me through high school and two years of part-time university, and also paid for much of the car trips I did around Canada and the USA in the 1960s, when the going was good and the cost of everything was low, low, low. 120 and 127 film from Kmart for 69 cents a roll and I was in seventh heaven. The Canuck buck was worth more than the US$ and I was paying 50 cents a roll for Verichrome Pan if I bought a brick (20 rolls). A good price for a Canadian tenner.

Not bad for a camera I paid about CDN $40 for in 1962. It went on working well, later as a second camera after I bought a Rolleiflex TLR in 1966, and continued doing its good work until I donated it to an Australian camera club in the 1990s. For all I know it may still be on a shelf in that camera club, gathering dust but still able to make a good image on film.

In all, those Yashica TLRs were ideal cameras for those now long-vanished times.

 

[Richard G]

I had two ZM lenses in for repair, the 25 fortunately just needing cleaning and relubrication of the focus helical. I remember nearly fifty years ago reading in 1975 (?) The Leica Manual what to look for when buying second hand gear. With my intermittently binding focus of the ZM 35 C Biogon I forgot the fourth sense: hearing. The lens looked and smelt fine, but the feel was certainly not right. The master technician solved the problem in seconds, like a physician already sure just from what I told him: he shook the lens near his ear. Just as he thought - a screw loose. Dismantled, screw located, replaced and secured I’m very pleased to have this great little lens in use again.

 

[ChrisPlatt]

My most recent items serviced by Eric Hendrickson:

Pentax MX body
Pentax SV body
Auto Takumar 35/3.5 lens
SMC Pentax 30/2.8 lens
SMC Pentax-M 35/2.8 lens

Turnaround time for all was 2 weeks.
Grand total was $300 which included return shipping.

Chris

 

[ellisson]

Dear ellison,

Thats great to hear! I dealt with Authorized Camera Repair once. He did an awesome job repairing a Nikon 5.8 cm f1.4 S lens that was my grandfather's. The aperture was weepy and had hazed the internal elements. I've tried to do more business with them several times but to their credit, they have quoted me prices which seemed very fair and stated that unless the items had significant personal value there really was no point in repairing them, as I would never likely recover the cost of the repairs.

That kind of honestly is refreshing. I have some time off over Easter weekend and I may take a drive to see him. He's quoted me a price for refurbishing a Yashica D but said he'd rather get a look at it before he went ahead with the reconditioning. We will see what happens.

Regards,

Tim Murphy

Harrisburg PA 🙂

Hey Tim, I consider this shop and the repair guy (Matt, I think) a real gem around here. Once I brought in a Zeiss ZM rangefinder camera with a shutter speed dial problem. It must have been a trivial problem for him. He fixed it on the spot in about 5 minutes for free. The SL66E repair was much more complex, and it took more time. Much of that time was the long queue of work ahead of mine. Eight weeks later it was done and the camera works like new. Twenty minutes from my home, too.

 

[Tim Murphy]

Hey Tim, I consider this shop and the repair guy (Matt, I think) a real gem around here. Once I brought in a Zeiss ZM rangefinder camera with a shutter speed dial problem. It must have been a trivial problem for him. He fixed it on the spot in about 5 minutes for free. The SL66E repair was much more complex, and it took more time. Much of that time was the long queue of work ahead of mine. Eight weeks later it was done and the camera works like new. Twenty minutes from my home, too.

Dear ellison,

The only bad thing I'd ever say about Matt is that his shop is over 2 hours and $ 25.00 worth PA turnpike of tolls from me. 😉

I used to have reason to travel to the Philadelphia area but no longer do. I think I will take a ride the Thursday or Friday before Easter just to check the place out. I am of the age that greatly prefers brick and mortar stores and personal relationships with store owners. This might be one of my last chances to make one of those relationships!

Regards.,

Tim Murphy

Harrisburg PA 🙂