Learn Camera Repair – Although film is making something of a come back, one of the areas that is a huge potential stumbling block is the fact that most professional technicians are now either retired or close to retiring. In the UK over the last few years a whole bevy of some of the most expert repairers have closed up shop leaving classic film camera buffs with few options. Some whole marques and models are now almost unrepairable and with the so often heard advice of ‘just throw it away and buy another’ the available pool of viable cameras will only get smaller.
So how hard is it to do it yourself? What do you need to get started? Is it all worth it? In this article I’ll give you a walk through of my own journey and try to point out some of the pitfalls in learning repair. Now I don’t pretend to be the greatest, the wisest or even universal – after all it’s as big a folly to claim you are universal as it is to claim you are unique.
So how hard is it?
“Is it hard? Not if you have the right attitudes. It’s having the right attitudes that’s hard”
Robert M Persig – Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
If you’re talking replacing light seals or cleaning a battery terminal it’s not very hard at all and indeed some of the more straightforward issues are easily solved with the help of articles and web resources (I publish a few on this site) but if you’re talking actual repairs and full on CLA work (cleaning, lubrication and adjustment) it’s a fair bit tougher.
I’ll tell you what learn camera repair isn’t and maybe that will scare a few people off and save them time from reading the full article. It’s an approach I learnt from Tarkovsky the director of the Soviet Sci Fi film Solaris – Tarkovsky put a huge section of film in just after the start of the movie of a seemingly endless car journey – it’s intention was to use an excruciatingly tedious and dull section of film to drive the dull or unwilling to invest type people out of the cinema as, in Tarkovskys view, they would be unlikely to understand or appreciate the rest of the film – how’s that for stunning condescension. I’ll try to be a bit kinder though.
I can tell you more quickly what camera repair isn’t and it’s not;
- Buggering about aimlessly hoping you can make it work.
- Pouring lighter fuel or WD40 into a camera or lens based on ‘wotsisname’ on Facebook’s advice.
- A quick to learn side hustle with riches at the end of it.
So how do you get started?
Well there are two paths to follow – I can only truly relate my own learn camera repair path but my own journey may give you some pointers.
“Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.”
John Milton – Paradise Lost
The first path is you download the Society of Photo-Technologists (SPT) courses and do the theory and practical lessons. The SPT course is very good but you will need to acquire some cameras to do the practical parts of the course with. It’s a long hard road for sure but will give you a good grounding. The course is available at learncamerarepair.com and will give you a solid block of know-how of different types of cameras and their associated shutters, a grounding in electronics and of course critical know how about lens repairs.
The second route, and the way I chose is the school of hard knocks and hands on. Which one works best is really down to how you learn best. For me I never was much one for reading books and theory and will always learn faster through my hands. I like to think of myself as a kind of technological gypsy. Usually I can figure stuff out from any machine just by playing with it, taking it to bits, experimenting, and putting it back together. Now that sounds dangerously like ‘buggering about’ which I cautioned against at the start of the article but it’s more a case of taking pictures and notes, watching how it works by observation. Comparing to service manuals and then reading some theory if I can’t work it out.
Confucius wouldn’t have even known what a camera was but his third route to wisdom is very true if you’re doing the same approach as me.
What I will say about my approach is you will almost ALWAYS need a service manual because not everything inside a camera is obvious and of course for some of the set-up and tuning you will need the manufacturers guidance as to what tolerances are allowable and how to align certain parts etc. Bear in mind even relatively simple mechanical cameras may contain around 1500 precision parts and springs. If you’re going to do the “learn as you go” approach you need to have a pretty good grounding in mechanics and basic electronics and a pretty solid understanding of how the camera actually works at the start. If you lack those then the SPT course is probably your better route to knowledge.
Bear in mind the manufacturers service manuals were mostly designed for people who were already proficient at managing camera repair – they are not designed to be a training course for the camera. Without some practical experience the service guides are often no help at all offering little more than exploded diagrams.
Now, I said I generally learn faster using my hands on approach, BUT I also read everything there is to read. I joined forums, read everything that was posted and took onboard advice from genuine acknowledged experts. The best forum for this is the Learn Camera Repair Facebook group because it has genuinely experienced folk in there and not bodgers who are always suitably reined in. Why didn’t I do the SPT course myself? The answer is I originally intended to and being naive at the start imagined it couldn’t be that hard to do. After some time I realised that given my age (ancient) and limited time I could never hope to get competent across a large range of cameras so I specialised. It’s the old, old saw about get big, get niche or get out. I chose niche. In my case I simply won’t live long enough to learn every camera and shutter mechanism – to get where I am now, which is competent on a small handful of camera types and lens repairs has taken 5 years of learning and experience where I spent every weekend working on cameras and quite a few evenings too. Like any serious hobby camera repair takes time and there are no shortcuts.
If you have a passion for a particular camera this approach of just learning a single type or sub-group may work well for you as you can specialise. If you want to be a generalist and/or have a real breadth of knowledge the SPT course is an absolute must.
My approach was to acquire broken cameras and lenses, download the service guides or even better a tutorial if one was available on the camera and go from there. Initially I worked only on lenses as I already had some experience from working with telescope optics. For lenses and cameras get some hands on and learn how the mechanism works. Good general advice is not to assume a You Tube video is right or sensible or even smart no matter how many followers the YouTuber has – There is much bad practice shown on You Tube videos by people claiming expert status on the basis of ‘likes’ and some of these are positively clueless. Not every YouTuber is an idiot or bodger but unfortunately at the start of your journey you will be hard put to tell which is which. Bad advice extends onto many forums and web pages as well unfortunately. My rule of thumb is don’t trust anyone less experienced than yourself.
“All men are not equal in wisdom – the half-wise are everywhere”
Hávamál
I managed to mash up a Fujica ST605 at the start of my journey from following some You Tube advice which was seriously duff and later on an auto Rokkor after a You Tube video I watched forgot to mention a fairly critical element of the disassembly. I was sufficiently au-fait at the time of the near disaster with the Rokkor and good enough to get myself out of a hole dug by a combination of a less than accurate You Tube guide and my own over confidence about working with a similar model of lens. For a less experienced person it might have been a worse disaster and yet another lens consigned to the bin.
My journey into the black art of camera repair started by me bagging up anything I could from charity shops but quickly found it’s a hard way of doing it. Some cameras are much harder than others to work on and doubly so when there are no service manuals available and you are on your own with no support and not enough experience to guide you. I have had disasters early on in my own learning experience and you will too for sure – the disasters are a learning experience in their own right. If nothing else you will know that a certain make or model of camera is beyond your ability (at least for the present). It’s a truism that we learn most from our failures – though you don’t want to take that principle too far.
So that’s lesson Number 1, don’t get into this thinking you will be able to fix any camera that ever existed. Most of the pro level amateurs like me tend to specialise in only a few cameras where they have built up some solid experience over time. The real expert older techs can fix most things but they have had 40 years or more to build up the experience and they learnt in a safe environment with more experienced people on hand to help out at the start of their journey PLUS they often had factory training – little of that is available now.
Dip a toe in the water first … so my advice would be buy a camera that has a known issue. Minolta X-700s for instance have known issues with their capacitors. Buy a banger and see if you can fix it. It may have more than the capacitors at fault so you may need to go a bit deeper. This is how you learn to deal with the more common issues. You have to see every camera you buy on this journey not as a possible money maker and a quick side hustle (eg you paid £10 for it but fixed it so you can sell it for £100) but a lesson that’s costing you £10 to learn how to fix that model of camera. I confess when I started I had not thought it would be so hard – experience has shown otherwise. For the hands on learner you should ideally look for something that’s purely mechanical. Find a CLA guide and the service manual and follow that – it will give you experience of taking most of the camera to pieces and learning how parts inter-operate. Be prepared to have to pay for some of these resources.
I learnt the very most about the Minolta SRT-101 from buying a banger that I was sure I could fix because I had already worked on so many of them – this as it turned out was a big mistake! The banger had so much wrong with it that I was initially minded to scrap it for spares but decided to use it as a learning tool. £30 wasted – not a bit of it – it was a massive education for me. There’s no virtue quite like necessity and few better teachers than experience.
I learnt lots from that camera but the biggest lesson was lesson number 2 – always keep confidence balanced a safe distance from arrogance and don’t get too big a head. Ego is a problem in any repair work – stay humble.
Now a word of caution here if you are going to buy a camera to learn with make sure it’s something where there are online resources – manuals, service guides and ideally a tutorial. There’s no point buying a rare HokkiKokki STX-7 if there’s no service guides because you will really struggle and there may be little or no expertise online to help. Another aspect of this is spares availability. Whole legions of cameras are now facing extinction because of shortage of spares. This may be because the camera in question was never very popular so finding a spare is hard (Some of the later Yashica 35mm SLRs for instance) or it may be that the camera is super desirable and consequently even people selling a complete wreck want lots of money for it (Minolta XD/XE and Nikon F2s for example). If you’re going to learn at the start my suggestion would be something you can acquire cheaply both as the learner camera and as a spares source. I ended up doing Minolta SRTs. Not out of any particular passion at the start for them but simply because they were available at a low price and one of the first cameras I ever had to REALLY fix was an SRT which gave me my start. As time goes by you will be able to apply the knowledge from one camera to another.
The experiences of trying to fix any and every camera is what forced me to go niche and just work on a small handful of models. and there’s lesson number 3 – if you butterfly about trying to manage all comers you will more likely fail more often than you succeed. You need to build confidence first and confidence comes from having success. Once you have built on some success you will feel happier and better able to manage something new.
Choose your poison?
There is a world of difference between older mechanical cameras and later electronic ones. For electronic cameras you need a fair degree of electronics know how to stand a chance of fixing them. Their mechanics are, at least in some respects, similar but even relatively simple electronic cameras can be a nightmare when things aren’t working.
What you decide to work on is very much a case of which you feel most comfortable with. The standard camera to learn mechanical SLRs on is the Pentax K1000 which is a simple mechanical camera with minimal electronics. It’s ideal in many ways as it’s entirely mechanical so you can actually see how its works. I transitioned from strictly mechanical cameras like the Pentax K1000 and the Minolta SRT series through to some of the electronic marvels. For me, even with my electronics know how, I think I might have struggled with an electronic wonder without the experience gained on more simplistic cameras.
What do you need to get started?
“An adequate supply of gumption is the first and most important tool. If you haven’t got that you might as well gather up all the other tools and put them away, because they won’t do you any good.”
Robert M Persig – Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance
Attitude and will are the most important tools, but with that said you will get nowhere without the right physical tools for the job. The bare minimum will be a good set of screwdrivers, both JIS and cross headed/flat bladed types, a lens spanner and some rubber cones. Don’t rush in and buy every tool going. I started small – just some good quality tweezers, fine wire cutters, some fine nosed pliers, jewellers drivers and (for Japanese cameras) some JIS screw drivers. Over time I have added extra lens spanners for specific tasks, slotted drivers to deal with specialised nuts and fittings, rubber cones (an absolute must for many lenses). In addition you will need various chemicals and lubricants. There is a complete listing of tools and chemicals at the end of the article with recommendations. It’s best to start small and build up slowly. As with any hobby buy the very best tools you can afford – they will last longer and will not cause you additional grief in repairs. I had something of a hot start as I used to work in electronics so already had a good selection of precision tools and soldering gear.
The cost of tools… What do you need?
The cost of tools is what puts most people off as a hobby. While you can often do some repairs with just a few micro-drivers and a lens spanner for full on work inside most camera bodies you need a wider variety of tools. The more different types of cameras you work with the chances are the more tools you will need. Some of these you will have to make yourself because manufacturers often employed special tools which of course are no longer available.
To really manage repair and servicing work you also need a shutter tester and one that’s capable of measuring curtain speeds if you are working with 35mm camera with focal plane shutters. Many low cost testers on eBay and similar won’t help as they can’t measure curtain speeds and many of these will be useful only for a rough and ready assessment of the shutter speed as they lack accuracy.
And here’s lesson No.3 really – gearing up to do camera repair is expensive. It’s not a cheap hobby and you will struggle to find buyers for your work once you are able to turn out fully serviced cameras. Just look at Facebook groups and see how often the advice is not to bother with repairing a camera and just buy another cheap one on eBay. A fast side hustle is definitely not what you will find.
My short picks for tools for anyone starting out would be would be…
These will allow you to work on some lenses and with a few extra bits like a soldering iron and some snipe nosed pliers, wire cutters and tweezers will get you through much of the work on many cameras and lenses. You may need an additional set of watchmakers slotted drivers to deal with some lenses.
You will of course have to invest in assorted materials like light seal foam, lithium grease, moly grease, Nyoil, Isoprop Alcohol, Hydrogen Peroxide, Ammonia and you won’t believe how many cotton buds, cotton wool balls and cocktail sticks you will get through during the average repair. To go with the materials you will also need applicators. I favour syringes and watchmakers precision oilers. You will, if you take up camera repair, have at last a real use for old toothbrushes especially when it comes to cleaning old lubricants.
Now as you progress through repairs you will sooner or later need test equipment. In order to set up most mechanical and electronic SLRs you will need a shutter tester capable of measuring both curtain speeds and shutter speeds and to set up meters on many cameras you will need a calibrated light source. These two items will be the most expensive single part of your tooling and the element that puts most people off doing serious repairs.
Spares
Almost no spares exist for many cameras from the golden age of film cameras. Your only chance of spares is cameras which are non-repairable. This is another good reason to stay niche. If you’re trying to spare for lots of different cameras your going to be forever held up waiting for a suitable donor camera to appear. If you stay niche you will very quickly find spares from cameras you messed up while learning. My advice is NEVER, EVER throw anything away and always treat a donor as if it was a worker. Mashing things up to get the bit you want right now usually means you will bust stuff that’s going to be useful later. Broken and non-repairable lenses and bodies are a useful source of spares not just for the critical stuff like focus screens but for the huge assortment of small screws, washers, springs etc. Cost of donor bodies is something you should consider when choosing what cameras and lenses to work on.
Shutter Testers and Calibrated Light Sources – This is where it gets expensive!
There have been various low cost shutter testers developed but few of them are capable of the accuracy required. Old school techs still rely on gear made by Kyoritsu but 2nd hand units are scarce and expensive – you can expect to part with around £3,000 – £5,000 for a working one. The other most common tester from the same period is the Zimmerman ZTS but these are rarer than hens teeth and you can expect to pay around £650-£1,000 for one IF it’s working. The problem with both of these pieces of kit is they are old and reliability is always going to be an issue.
Early on I bought the Phochron tester which was a Crowdfunded bit of kit. It’s rather good and subsequent testing comparing it with my pro level ZTS V tester has shown the Phochron comes very close in terms of accuracy for most shutter types (though it doesn’t handle Minolta SRTs well in my experience).
The Phochron is now out of production but they do show up for sale periodically for around the £200 mark and they are very accurate – close enough for most amateur level repairs. The other most current tester is the new Reveni Labs tester which sells for around $400 Canadian dollars.
The Reveni Labs https://www.reveni-labs.com/reveni-labs-camera-tester product is probably the closest anyone is going to get for a production made, ready to go tester that can offer pro level features and I fully intend acquiring one myself fairly soon as it is capable of testing for even more conditions than my ancient ZTS V.
You can see from this that learning repairs and doing it right is quite expensive and the demand really isn’t there so if your planning on learning repair you have to be doing it for love not money. If Mammon is your God then you will be disappointed. There are professional techs making a living from the art of camera repair but they tend to ply their trade on the more exotic cameras for which aficionados are willing to pay for.
That’s not a counsel of despair and there are, like me, several people learning and doing good work and I would always encourage people to learn the trade/art/dark magic whichever you prefer but I would also never want to get someone into a financial black hole in a search of El Dorado. You MUST see this, at least in the first phase, as a hobby NOT a money making opportunity.
Summing Up
“There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use.”
Freeman Dyson
So there you are – what you need is patience, practice and a lot of reading plus taking the occasional slap on the head either from a camera you couldn’t repair or a sudden bang to the head when an experienced expert tells you to shut up and listen. I did say ego is always a drawback so don’t get huffy when an experienced pro gives you advice.
On the upside if, like me, you find it rewarding at an emotional level (because as I explained I doubt you’ll find it rewarding in terms of cash in the bank) to fix old stuff and give these beautiful cameras a second life then you will find much support from others doing the same and who knows – you may end up being the only person doing repairs to a certain model of camera and you may just find a pot of gold out there. If not you can take satisfaction from the skills you acquire, the friendships you make and knowing you have helped preserve a part of 20th century industrial history.
I hope that’s given some of you reading this an insight and maybe a real desire to learn camera repair and get to grips with what can be a very rewarding hobby.
Tools List
The list I have assembled are the tools I use most frequently excepting some home made tools for special applications.
Hand Tools
- JIS Screwdriver Set – For all Japanese cameras and lenses – Budget
- JIS Screwdriver Set – For all Japanese cameras and lenses – Premium (the set I recommend)
- Watchmakers screwdriver set – Many lenses and cameras have micro grub screws and slotted screws
- Rubber Cones – Essential for many lens repairs
- Gum Rubber Bung from a wine flagon – Removing trim rings from cameras
- Lens Spanner – Essential for lens work
- Lens Sucker – Essential for lens work
- Exacto Knife or similar – For cutting lightseal materials)
- Metal Ruler – For cutting light seals
- Cutting Mat – For cutting light seals
- Tweezers – General purpose use
- Reverse tweezers – useful for soldering
- Small snipe nosed pliers – General purpose use
- 18W Soldering iron – Internal wiring in camera bodies
- Soldering iron stand with cleaning sponge – Essential for good soldering
- Solder – Internal wiring in bodies
- Solder sucker – I prefer a solder sucker. Buy the very best. Cheap ones NEVER work!
- Desolder braid – for desoldering
- Rocket blower – General purpose and lens cleaning
- Sable brushes – for applying grease, cleaning items
- Syringes – For applying glue and lubricants
- Watchmakers oilers – For applying fine oils like Nyoil
- Scissors – General purpose
- Old toothbrushes – For cleaning
- Micro hex drivers – Some camera bodies use micro hex fittings internally
- Ice Cube Trays – for storage of small parts)
Test equipment
- Multimeter – Essential for testing electrical circuits in many camera bodies
- Shutter Tester – Essential for almost any camera body. For focal plane shutters it must able to assess curtain speeds.
Chemicals and materials
- Isoprop Alcohol – General cleaning
- Acetone – Removal of threadlock
- Hydrogen Peroxide – Fungal removal from lenses
- Distilled Water – Cleaning of optical parts
- Ammonia – Fungal removal (I almost never use it)
- Baader Optical Wonder – General lens cleaning
- Microfibre cloths – Cleaning of optics
- Cotton buds – Cleaning of parts
- Cocktail sticks – General purpose
- Cotton wool balls – Cleaning
- Nyoil – Essential for fine lubrication
- Helimax XP – General purpose lens lubricant
- Lithium grease – Lubrication
- Dry Moly – Lubrication (I seldom use it)
- Graphite Powder – Lubrication (I seldom use it)
- Light Seal Materials – Camera bodies
- Optical felt – Camera body lights seals
Misc.
A collection of broken cameras – NEVER throw anything away. Non-repairable cameras are a goldmine for small screws, shims, springs, washers etc which are often hard to find.
Mel is one of the driving forces behind High 5 Cameras and writes all our articles.
Starting serious photography back in 1972. Over the years she got to shoot film with most of the major brands in 35mm and large format as both a studio photographer and content provider for websites in the early life of the web. These days she is rediscovering photography and has become the GOTO person for knowledge on camera repair advice.
Thank you for taking the time to write this, Mel. Beautifully written and a wealth of knowledge!