Look At The Muck In Here!

Thoughts and Prayers please! The ‘senior’ Soviet camera had a bit of a ‘funny (non) turn’ recently, so it's having the equivalent of a full cardiac check-up and artery flush. Needless to say this (potentially eye-wateringly expensive) treatment is being done on the private, but every camera deserves to shoot its best life and I have no intention of (ahem!) sending it to Switzerland just yet.

As you may know from a previous post, I managed to hamfistedly shred a film through the FED recently. A low budget horror story for sure, but thankfully no lasting damage done, or so I thought!

36 trouble-free exposures later and I was confident that all was well, but a closer examination of the scans revealed that something wasn’t quite right...

The small black ‘gromit’ that’s been appearing on negatives for some time now is still stubbornly refusing to go away, or indeed move (right). This predates the shredding incident, a speck of something within the camera that must be close to the focal point given that it’s so sharply defined. Now if the back of a FED-1 opened up like ‘normal’ cameras, I’d have already sorted this problem out, but this is a bottom-loader in the old Barnack style and you wouldn’t believe how many screws and knobs need removing just to reveal the shutter mechanism! Besides, this isn’t in fact my main concern with the camera.

Exhibit No.2 is this significantly paler area at the edge of the image (left). Something I may have put down to a line of clouds if it wasn't for the fact that it manifests on most, if not all the photos from my Loughborough Sculpture Trail. Looking back at earlier scans I can see that this is not in fact a new problem, but does seem to be more notable. This may of course be down to the brighter conditions of near-Summer highlighting the problem.

So a fundamental issue that's not likely to go away, almost certainly down to one of the Shutter Curtains needing adjusting, or as all the evidence is pointing to, the shutter mechanism needing a jolly good clean before things get any worse.

In truth I've been quite lucky that a fully manual camera from around 1953 has worked at all. These cameras were robustly built, but many will have developed one or more faults with age and potentially half a century or more of neglect. This leaves us in the tricky position of either dismantling and repairing the camera ourselves, not an impossible task but mighty fiddly, or sending it off to an expert in the field.

Expertise like this comes at a price of course, much of which is to be found in former Soviet countries such as Ukraine. Lucky for me there are one or two experts nearby, and my hand has now been forced somewhat by things getting significantly worse.

Back to that shredded film then, gentle tapping of the body over a sheet of white paper, and with the bottom plate removed, has revealed just how much 'kipple' the camera has acquired over time (above & below). Yes there's a fair few film shreds, but much of the dirt appearing on the paper appears to be pieces of hardened grease or other lubricant.

Worse still, during this gentle tapping, shooting and winding process, the wind-on knob seized mid-turn, refusing to budge even with the shutter mechanism disengaged. Clearly this camera is in need of a CLA (Clean, Lubricate, Adjust), a job best left to the professionals on this occasion.

Now there's a school of thought that because of the high costs of maintenance involved, many vintage cameras are simply not worth repairing. Just go out and buy an inexpensive new (old) one and consign the faulty unit to the display cabinet. This seems terribly wasteful to me, and perhaps more to the point, starting from scratch with a replacement merely kicks the can down the road, you're investing once again in a camera of unknown provenance and likely to fall foul of similar problems in the long run. Yes it's going to be expensive, but hopefully I'll end up with a camera as close to it's original working condition as possible.

So the FED is now in the hands of repair specialists, who to my relief appeared totally unfazed by the (almost) antique model I presented them with. Depending on the results I'll tell you who, and how much when I get the camera back. Thoughts and Prayers for my wallet then...