Warning: I chose between a broken shutter spring and a seized aperture blade on a Saturday job

Last weekend a guy brought in a beat-up Canon A-1 from a flea market (you know, the kind with mystery problems). I had to decide whether to dig into the shutter mechanism first or tackle the stuck aperture blades that looked like they had 40 years of gunk. I picked the aperture because it seemed faster, but then I dropped the tiny retaining ring into my carpet and spent 20 minutes with a flashlight on my hands and knees. Turns out the aperture was fine after cleaning, but I found a broken spring in the shutter while I was in there anyway. Has anyone else had a repair where the obvious problem wasn't really the problem?

2 comments

2 Comments

amy6921mo ago

That little retaining ring thing, man. I was fixing an old sewing machine once and the exact same thing happened with a screw so small I swear it just vanished into another dimension. Finally found it stuck to the bottom of my coffee mug three days later. But yeah, I spent a whole afternoon cleaning out a feed dog mechanism only to realize the real issue was just a dried up drop of oil on the bobbin case. Sometimes these things just lead you down a rabbit hole before you find the actual simple fix.

beth_baker691mo ago

Why are we pretending these little detours are a bad thing? If you hadn't gone down that rabbit hole and cleaned the feed dog, you'd still be wondering if that was the problem later. The time you spent wasn't wasted, it just proved what it wasn't. That's how you learn these machines inside and out. Maybe the real trick is learning to enjoy the goose chase.