Yamato Pax 35 experiment

[weirdnerd]

A couple of weeks ago I got a really small " Pax" camera, the focusing mechanism was fused together with solidified 70 year old grease, searched a little and found something similar on " agfa green grease syndrome". Took it personally as I like to fix things to work as advertised. Soaked the lens barrel ( without the lenses) in a mixture of methanol, white gas and xylol, it took six days of soaking to free it, then I used some pure methanol to rinse, and took to assemble it again.

I noriced after fiddling with the shutter mechanism and found out a little tab that returns the shutter cocking mechanism was broken, so I will take the piece to a jeweler next week to silver solder 2mm more so the spring can return the shutter, ( surry, I am a tinkerer and sometimes I don't know the proper names of the parts.

Here are some pictures about it.

 

[weirdnerd]

The overall size of the camera is ridiculously small, I really like it.

I used helicoid grease to lube the helicoil, and a pin drop of triflow on moving parts. No shutter leaft touched. So it won't stick

 

[oftheherd]

Looks interesting. Hope you get it working and can show us some photos from it.

 

[weirdnerd]

Well, it took six days of soaking to free the lens hellicoids, did a tip of triflow on pivot points on the shutter, and found that the cocking lever had a part missing, after 70 years it was not rare, so I silver soldered a small piece of brass to the stump ( the jeweler price was way more than what I wanted to spend on it) , filed and shaped it to catch the return spring and re assembled, will have to address the view finder turret as the rangefinder is very lagging during focusing, probably caked grease is at work, here are some pictures of how it went.

 

[weirdnerd]

This camera is really small.

 

[weirdnerd]

How I did solder the part, took a lot of patience.

 

[wwfloyd]

... Soaked the lens barrel ( without the lenses) in a mixture of methanol, white gas and xylol, it took six days of soaking to free it, then I used some pure methanol to rinse, and took to assemble it again.
...

It's good to hear this mixture worked. Did you use equal parts of the 3? Did the paint on the distance scale survive?



Yeah, the rangefinder arm on mine is solidified, too. Keep us posted on how you deal with that.

 

[weirdnerd]

The paint on the engraving survived.

 

[Schuter]

Nice work...

The grease used on these cameras really does turn to glue. I recently combined the best parts of two Pax 35s into one that works very nicely. Despite the somewhat crude internal workings, it is actually a rather solid camera. The optics are better than I expected. I just developed and scanned the first roll from mine since repairing it. It's a joy to use, and it's just so dang cute.

Enjoy the project...and the camera. I'll look forward to seeing some photos.