Vintage camera reviews, repairs and photography blog
A few weeks ago I acquired an Agfa Colorflex 35mm, fixed lens, slr camera which had a few problems with the shutter. In order to see what was wrong I needed to remove the shutter from the camera, and this short post shows the sequence I went through to do that. Agfa Colorflex Strip down pictures Removing the shutter from the Agfa Colorflex camera body was a relatively easy operation, as the sequence above shows, but once I’d removed it […]
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Having completed the easy part of my Agfa Karat 12 camera refurbishment with the film advance strip down and clean up, I then turned my attention to the next easiest part which is the Compur-Rapid shutter fitted to this model. As suppled, the shutter was very stiff to operate and only worked at one speed, irrespective of the shutter settings. It seemed the most likely problem was that the shutter needed a good clean out then it would probably be fine […]
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A couple of weeks ago I completed the restringing of the exposure meter of my Retina Reflex S which left me with a clean and working shutter and body ready to assemble together again. Yesterday I completed that operation this post covers the Retina Reflex S re-assembly. Retina Reflex S re-assembly images I have to say that this was probably the most awkward part of the whole re-assembly. It wasn’t exactly difficult, but I found it frustrating because I had […]
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In my last post I described how I removed the shutter from my Kodak Retina IIc camera, and in this post I’m going to describe how I stripped down and cleaned the slow speed regulator and self timer on the compur synchro shutter. Although I have carried this procedure on other compur shutters, I still found a lot of guidance for this on the retina rescue site and I would recommend anyone who needs to work on these cameras to […]
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In my last post I described the process I followed to strip my Olympus OM-1n down to clean the shutter and film transport mechanism. In this post I’m going to describe the Olympus OM-1n reassembly and how I made sure everything was still working. Once I had the shutter mechanism cleaned up I tried all the speeds to check how accurate they were. At this point I got a bit confused because there seem to be more shutter speed positions […]
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This post is the next in my series about testing the health of your vintage camera. It covers how to test the shutter which, along with the aperture, is one of the most important parts of any camera since it controls the amount of light reaching the film. Initially it covers focal plane shutters, but will eventually be expanded to cover other shutter types. If you’re not sure if your camera has a focal plane shutter then open the back of […]
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This post attempts to answer the question ‘Is my vintage camera still working’? I started to write it as an answer to a comment when a reader asked for help to determine if a camera she owned was working properly. However, after a few minutes it became apparent that it is too complex a question to answer as a simple comment reply so I thought I’d instead write a full post with some guidance and details of the sort of […]
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This Agilux Agifold camera is unique in my collection by being completely and wholly made in the UK. I believe every other vintage camera I own has all, or at least some parts (shutter normally) made in Japan or Germany, but every part of the Agilux was made in a factory in Croydon. Agilux Agifold Images My Agifold Agilux Camera I bought my camera with a couple of known faults. The rangefinder view was apparently quite dull and difficult to […]
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This evening I took my first steps to repair my Pentacon six by having a look at what was stopping the second curtain closing when the shutter is fired. To do that I had to remove the top plate of the camera so I could examine it and I’ve detailed the Pentacon Six strip down procedure here. I won’t give many more details than the pictures because it is all pretty self explanatory and was actually quite easy. Pentacon Six […]
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As I said in another post earlier today I recently acquired an Edixa Reflex D 35mm SLR to join my vintage camera collection but discovered that the shutter assembly wasn’t working properly. The shutter release button seemed to jam and feel ‘gritty’ when pressed and the shutter operation was not at all reliable. I decided to have a go at stripping the camera down to see if I could find the cause so I took pictures along the way as […]
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I bought a new Miranda camera this week – a Miranda D-r which unfortunately had a few issues, the most pressing of which was the shutter release which fired once when I first received the camera, but then stuck with the film advance frozen. I managed to find out what I needed to do to repair it this afternoon so this is a short post describing the Miranda D-r shutter repair procedure. I had already taken the bottom off […]
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