How are your old camers holding out?

Sirius Glass said:

I am not old enough to be called "sir".

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Steve- I don't think it's your age that disqualifies you

My primary cameras are my Rolleiflexes, which both date from 1956, so they're rapidly approaching 60 years old. They work just fine, and with a periodic clean and lube they will keep on working past the end of my life. Most of the rest of my cameras are large format, so they don't need anywhere near the mechanical maintenance. Some of them are new(ish) - made within the last 15 years. Some of them are closing in on a century, and one of them is around 130 years old (although it does need work - a new bellows will be in the offing this year I hope).

I have three cameras more than 100 years old. All have their original lenses,shutters and bellows and usable.

Sirius Glass said:

I am not old enough to be called "sir".

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She might have said cur and I misheard her

At last countI had 12 film cameras, 8 of them made before 1975 and fully mechanical, and partially electronic m7, contax g1 and g2 and a hexar rf.

they all work, no problem, although I suspect the ones with electronic components will fail within 20 years or so while the fully mechanical cameras will be functioning fine at least though my grandkids' lifetime (if And when I have grandkids).

JDP said:

Hi,
I am wondering how old the average working film camera is these days, and thinking that it could easilly be 30 years. Many of these old cameras must be breaking and be unrepairable. Some of my gear is starting to show its age, and as a result I recently bought some newer gear which should keep me going a while longer.

If cameras break at a greater rate than photographers, there may not be enough to go around in years to come. Film Ferrania recently came up with a slogan 'film for 100 years' (or something like that). How many working film cameras will there be in 100 years time?

The oldest camera I use is a 1936 Zeiss Ikonta, but I would not rely on it for anything important!

How is your old gear holding out?

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The folders from the pre 1960s are getting tired but all SLRs(Nikon and Hasselblad) are still going strong.

My cameras are for motion-picture film. Say, I bite myself through the upcoming of the very first and early mass-produced products. Apart from what is yet to be discovered with the Bell & Howell Standard Cinematograph Camera (its original name*) of 1911 (sold from 1912 on), many fascinating facts keep me going on. One, for instance, is the puzzling story about the width of the aperture plates in Paillard-Bolex H cameras. The upper deviation of the film’s width tolerance has been 16 mm, but got changed somewhen to 15,975 mm. I find aperture plates (hardened steel) that are 16,02 mm wide. The lateral guide leaf springs cannot touch the film under these circumstances, an enigma. Of course did the engineers think of filming in the tropics where both the acetyle cellulose plastic base and the image gelatine may swell—still, film cut to the standard can sway from one side to the other a little.

More embarassing details can be found with otherwise long-lasting equipment. There is corrosion, certainly, when different metals touch each other and an electrolyte is around. Worse, parts have not been finished or pull-springs hooked up the wrong way around. Lens elements get the fungus desease because spores have been in the Canada balsam already in the forest. That’s only natural.

So not everything is perfect what we buy. Photography is one of the pioneer mass-products industries.
The difference between a (ciné) camera made for professional use and one for the amateur is its serviceability. If all parts are so made that they withstand multiple disassembly and assembly, in particular pins and bores, threads and screws, their manufacture costs significantly more. Even a Panaflex Millennium is a camera made in series. Unique and single originals seem to have become a thing of the past.

The oldest camera I have is a Bolex Auto B. The main spring is still in good shape. A 1931 Bell & Howell Eyemo, taken care of by a fellow mechanic a few years ago, runs nicely. The Ciné-Kodak Special from 1933 is an interesting camera. The Revere 101/102/103 is rugged and has a first-class gate. The Eumig C 16 has excellent mechanics inside, the Beaulieu Reflex 16 is the lightest of all three-port turret 16s and it was the last spring driven film motion-picture camera (published in March 1958). Super-8 made filming super easy but it also flooded households with the unspeakable conglomerate of plastics, magnetism, ozone, rubber adhesives, and mineral grease. Only Compact Cassette recorders are more loaded with such. The bad and dark years of cybernetics getting a hold back in the Seventies! Oh, not to forget the Thermite charges built into the pillars already in 1966 before being transported to the building ground of the World Trade Center towers. Beware, folks, history is full of covert operations!
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*Bell & Howell Co. cannot have invented, designed, and built the “2709” camera alone and between the founding of the company in February 1907 and the date of presentation. Howell, who gave his name for hundreds of patents, can impossibly have invented the film perforator Bell & Howell Co. is said to have offered to the industry in 1908. I have a Bell & Howell-Kodak perforator and have studied it. Those machines bear many years of trial and error in them, weighing of masses, scraped surfaces, the lubrication system, the cast frame, length of stroke, shape and finish of die and punches, you don’t come up with that just like that. Howell would only have had about a year of time to develop it. On the contrary, the main patent on the Bell & Howell perforator was applied for on March 2nd, 1917 (US 1,291,524). Considering the then 17 years of patent duration, something older seems to have been around since 1900. Howell and Bell first met in 1905.

Spores:
How could spores embedded in the lens resin and located between lens elements come to live again?

Furthermore there are spores around us and our cameras all the time.

If there is only little organic substance and very little water present, they can sprout. Dust and humidity, grease from fingers, dirt, organic material within the balsam, possibly. You often see limited growth due to limited organic masses. The fungus uses it all up, then comes to a halt.

The balsam is organic, but has low/no water content. Attack from its open edge seems more likely.

The fungus can’t attack the polymerised resin. You might be right.

Nearly every film camera I have has some idiosyncrasy or another. My two TLRs either lack a meter (1992 Seagull) or it doesn't work (1967 Yashica), but otherwise, they both function nicely. I'm still assessing my folders, and have only one, an Ikonta 521A (recently serviced by Certo6) that works precisely as it should. One needs its lens board popped into place when unfolding while another needs the shutter release rod positioned next to the release tab every time I open it up. Still another requires me to resist the shutter release tab when cocking the shutter so that it will catch. And there are those whose slower shutter speeds hang, leaving them a little limited in usefulness. Still, I tend to know the quirks of each, and have gotten a good feel for the practicality of each.

From reputation, I think that all Nikon F3 will live forever
Kidding, of course these will all go the way of the poodle sooner or later. I think the more complicated the camera the more difficult it is or will be to fix it when it breaks. My old folders required a service when I got them (slow speeds stuck) but they'll keep on snapping away happily, as long as nothing mechanical in the shutter goes.
What worries me the most is people getting old and dying, people who learned repairing our beloved Nikons and Pentaxes when they were new (the cameras, not the people), they have to pass on their knowledge, otherwise we're in deep. Here in Germany we have people like the "camera doctor" or the "OM-doctor", seeing these people go would really be a damn shame. Or Sover Wong, the man to go to when you have trouble with an F2. Do the people learning the trade these days get training on classic cameras?

Quite some amateurs have learned to repair cameras, and some are fit on certain models. To what extent that may be a substitute for trained repairmen remains the question.

AgX said:

Quite some amateurs have learned to repair cameras, and some are fit on certain models. To what extent that may be a substitute for trained repairmen remains the question.

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Even more amateurs have learned to destroy cameras by overestimating their abilities to repair them, because modern cameras are such complex electro- mechanical devices are far beyond the man in the street's ability to repair them instead of leaving it to a trained technician. Amateur camera repairers are like incompetent surgeons you only hear about their successes they bury their failures.

Even more amateurs have learned to destroy cameras by overestimating their repair abilities instead of leaving it to a trained technician.

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A very long time friend and excellent photographer told me he tore one of his malfunctioning lenses apart to make necessary "repairs". He said it all went well but had a few parts left over.......say what?....:confused:

It's a great thing to know your own limitations I'm a camera operator not a repairer, as far as I'm concerned paying to have my equipment professionally maintained is part of being a serious photographer.

i am lucky enough to have 2 fantastic camera repair businesses
down the street from me. i think my youngest camera is a me super
( 1980s or 90s ? ) but most everything else is between 50 and 100+ years old.
if the younger ones break, i have them repaired
by the folks down the street, or if they are old, i sometimes
have a parts camera i harvest parts off of and install them myself.
kind of like having 73 bug and a parts car in the back yard ...

If you own a Speed Graphic or Graflex it hooves* you to be able to repair the focal plane shutter.



* hooves is conjugated from behoove. Much like being have is conjugated from behave.

Sirius Glass said:

If you own a Speed Graphic or Graflex it hooves* you to be able to repair the focal plane shutter.



* hooves is conjugated from behoove. Much like being have is conjugated from behave.

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not necessarily.

jnanian said:

not necessarily.

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Who will you find to do your repair work? What will you pay?

I did not say it was a requirement, I said it was useful. Please go back to your salad fork.

Trail Images said:

A very long time friend and excellent photographer told me he tore one of his malfunctioning lenses apart to make necessary "repairs". He said it all went well but had a few parts left over.......say what?....:confused:

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I did that once with an old carburetor. Even with the left over parts, the car still ran okay, lol, but that is why I'm reluctant to rip open any of my cameras yet.

My cameras are functioning well, so I've no reason to learn at the moment.

Sirius Glass said:

Who will you find to do your repair work? What will you pay?

I did not say it was a requirement, I said it was useful. Please go back to your salad fork.

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there is a repair guy down the street from me who is not old and works on graflex and graphic cameras all the time.
he is a sponsor/advertiser of this website. and if it was necessary, i would pay him what he billed me like i have
for other cameras i sent to him for repair. while it might be useful for some to know how to take apart
a focal plane shutter ( and i have taught a handful of people myself, posted step by step instructions
on threads here on apug and other websites as well ) it isn't necessarily a requirement if you own
that sort of camera. and it isn't helpful or useful to know how to do it, if you don't want to ..

jnanian said:

there is a repair guy down the street from me who is not old and works on graflex and graphic cameras all the time.
he is a sponsor/advertiser of this website. and if it was necessary, i would pay him what he billed me like i have
for other cameras i sent to him for repair. while it might be useful for some to know how to take apart
a focal plane shutter ( and i have taught a handful of people myself, posted step by step instructions
on threads here on apug and other websites as well ) it isn't necessarily a requirement if you own
that sort of camera. and it isn't helpful or useful to know how to do it, if you don't want to ..

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Most people do not have "a repair guy down the street from me who is not old and works on graflex and graphic cameras". It was an advisory that one should consider if one uses a large format cloth focal plane shutter. You act like I demanded that one do that. Until you learn the difference between a requirement or a demand, you can poke your forks elsewhere. You are getting into splitting hairs that even the two letter troll would not split.

Sirius Glass said:

Most people do not have "a repair guy down the street from me who is not old and works on graflex and graphic cameras"

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you asked me where i would send it if it needed to be worked on ...

and if it wasn't the guy down the road i'd google "graflex repair" and send it to someone else ...
like shutter finger who posts on this forum ... there are plenty of people who work on these cameras
and doing the work oneself is not at all a requirement.
people mail cameras to repair people all the time.