16-1-18

It's dying. This camera is dying. The light meter stopped working. There's lots of reading on the internet and some even describes it as being fixable. I'll need to fabricate a couple of tools, most importantly a spanner for the pinned fasteners. And I know of at least one of the fittings that's reverse threaded. I do have an old compass kicking around, with pins for both points, that might work. But if I break one old tool trying to fix another old tool I'd have two broken and irreplaceable things instead of just one.

There's very little to the light meter in these cameras. A battery, which I've checked and replaced, a sensor, that doesn't wear out, a paddle that kicks out on a linkage to push a pin on the lens, which works just fine, and a couple of wires. There are a whole mess of screws and springs and washers and plates between the inside and outside of this camera and somewhere in there is a wire that's probably come loose. But I can't really break something that's already broken and things can be fixed. The 20mm Nikkor lens I bought on Craigslist didn't work so well, or at all, until I extracted all the little screws it had and twisted it apart to clean the aperture blades. Taking apart a whole camera is a little more daunting to maybe find a loose wire.

But the camera is 52 years old. The camera I took this picture with is 8 years old and one of the dials works maybe half the time and while it can be fixed, it's a thing I surely won't be able to fix.

Spanner tool. Micro screwdrivers. I don't need reading glasses yet but maybe I'll even get a pair of the googly eyed magnifying goggles with the lights built in. And I'll see if I can't get this thing working again.

If I do, you'll be the first to know. If I don't, I'll come back here and edit this post, replacing the photo with one of my cat.