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It works fine . . . except . . .
How
many times have you heard a similar line when asking about a vintage
camera you're thinking about adding to your collection? The seller
smiles and says, "It works fine...except...." Immediately,
all may not be as happy as it seems and you hold your breath waiting
to find out what the exception is and, if you're like me, how hard
it will be to fix!
One of the requests I get most often is the need for a "How To"
section describing the kinds of repair issues many of us have to
undertake if we are serious about having working copies of the cameras
in our collections. Even though I believe there is a lot we can
do ourselves, for many requests I recommend letting a professional
do it.
I was once contacted by a man whose shutter curtain had jammed,
and he wanted to know how to fix it himself. He admitted he had
never tried it before, but couldn’t see paying his local camera
shop $100+ to repair a 30-year-old film camera. But, since he didn't
want to ruin it, he thought I might be able to walk him through
it, step-by-step. C'mon! Get real! I don't have the time for
that! I thought the camera shop was doing him a favor at that
price, but he didn't see it that way. The trouble was, as a novice,
he had about as much chance of fixing it himself as he did trying
to learn bullfighting from a magazine article.
Professional repairs, if you can find someone to attempt them these
days, can be expensive. Particularly when compared with the apparent
worth of the camera. But the reason they are expensive is because
it is highly skilled work. Often, specialized tools are needed,
or hard-to-find parts may need to be made, and even taking apart
a simple camera requires experience and patience. Those who dabble
with camera repairs as a hobby - like me - are also usually prepared
to accept the fact the operation might fail, leaving a dead patient
on the table. Are you?
Think of it this way: Imagine you had to go to the hospital for
surgery. Do you want the scalpel in the hands of someone just thinking
about studying medicine? While there is a lot most novices
can do to fix a camera, the shutter curtain roller of a Mamiya XTL
is no place for most of us!
If the camera means a lot to you, a full service repair, including fixing the meter,
will often cost less than $150...but your camera would come back working like new, and
you'd have another twenty years of good service out of it (assuming you can continue to
find film).
Other requests . . .
I receive other requests that deal with how to use
the camera. Not instruction manual questions (OK, those too), but
things like, "What is the Sunny 16 Rule?" or "What's
the Rule of Thirds all about?" or some other "how-to-shoot"
question. It's almost as if, in this age of digital gizmos that
do so much for us, or allow so many instant "makeovers," that many
have forgotten the basic tenets us old-timers were taught about
creating images with light. No, scratch that. It isn't almost...like that...it
is.
So, after much procrastinating and mumbling that all the digital
noobies should pay a professional to fix their film cameras, I decided
it made sense to provide information for those who really wanted
to learn how to do some of the simpler things themselves. To begin
with, I gathered the "do-it-yourself repair" questions and tried
to decide which ones could not only be answered quickly, but were
really the kind of repairs that the "average" collector would (or
should) be likely to attempt for themselves. Then I added answers
to some of the simple "general photography" questions, to come up
with a workable list. It is by no means complete, but the items
I am working on so far are listed below. I'll probably post others,
as I receive new questions (or, more honestly, as I have time to
create the responses to them).
Note: you will probably figure this out yourself fairly
quickly, but the line items below in blue are live page links; those
in black are pages still under construction. If you don't see a link...
well, there's a obviously a reason for that, too!
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