Manually triggering shutter on Hasselblad CF lenses

Steven Lee

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Jul 10, 2022
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I am getting more serious about my Hasselblad system and just acquired a couple of extension tubes and the Hasselblad tool for winding their shutters. The tool is basically a screwdriver with a safety shroud to prevent it from slipping, and coking shutters this way is fairly straightforward.

What I find strange is that Youtube has dozens of videos showing how to cock, but I found nothing about triggering shutters on lenses. Coking is trivial and obvious, the "instructions" in a form of the arrow and the dot are right on the lens!

But triggering is not obvious. There's this fragile looking pin. I tried gently pushing it in to no avail, and then I accidentally discovered that pushing it out towards the outer edge of the lens triggers the shutter. However, no advice is found anywhere online on how to do this properly and safely. Is this what a camera is doing? Hard to tell, but I worry about breaking or messing with the alignment of the pin.

In case you're wondering why I'm fucking around with my lenses, the answer is extension tubes. As I was practicing putting them on/off according to the manual (body first), somehow one of the lenses self-triggered when I was taking it off the tube. So I figured that getting proficient with manually cocking+triggering lenses is a good skill to have.

I've read both the user manual and the service manual for CF/CFI lenses and strangely none of them mention the recommended procedure for triggering a shutter. The service manual simply says "trigger the shutter" in a few places.

How do you do it? Fingernail push to the outside?

 
Last edited:

bdial

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Jan 2, 2005
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Manually triggering the lens shutter isn't something you need to do very often. Cocking it, however, is needed every once in a while. No special tool is needed, a coin works well, and I think that's how it's illustrated in the manual.
In dealing with extension tubes, always mount the tube(s) sans lens on the body first, then put the lens on. In undoing things, reverse the order. That will minimize accidentally tripping the shutter in the lens.
No matter what, always make sure the body is cocked before doing anything with the lens or tubes.
 
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