Opening a Mamiya 645 Super

[suzyj]

Hi,

I recently bought a Mamiya 645 super, and received with it a second body for spares. The first body is working very well (after a thorough clean, and replacement of the mirror bump foam). The spare body needs some love. The shutter works in manual mode, at 1/60th second, but other than that it won't fire. The battery check works (with a fresh battery), so I'd guess there's a broken wire or similar on the shutter release. The mechanism for the aperture control is also sticky, so the aperture coupling pops out of the prong, so that will require some TLC as well.

I'm pretty good at camera repair, having done quite a bit of work on mainly Nikon FE series cameras, plus a CLA on a Bronica (easy, as everything is so lovely and large), so am quite confident of fixing it.

The only problem is that I can't find my way in. I can remove the lower cover, which has obvious screws holding it on, but the side covers are more stubborn - they appear to be held in place by the mirror up knob on the left and the shutter speed dial on the right, neither of which appear to be removeable. Unlike the Bronica or my Nikons the Mamiya case is moulded plastic, so it's not simply a case of lifting leatherette to reveal screws etc.

So does anyone have any tips? I'd greatly appreciate some pointers.

Cheers,

Suzy

 

[John Koehrer]

If there are levers & knobs in the way, screws are usually hidden beneath decorator plates. Most of the time a dab of alcohol on the plate & some judicious prying with a straight pin will pop it right off

 

[suzyj]

Done. Turns out the knobs weren't the problem - there were some plastic click tabs holding the sides to the front. Pulling the aperture reading assembly provided access, so they could be unclicked.

I've put lots of annotated pictures on my flickr stream detailing the procedure: Dead Link Removed

 

[tkamiya]

Suzy,

Will you please tell me if you were able to access the PC socket itself when you took your Super apart? From your pictures, it appears the socket itself and what's under it is not accessible. I need to check connections of this socket.

Thank you.

 

[suzyj]

The whole PC socket comes off with the left side cover, along with the hotshoe.

It's connected to the hotshoe with a bit of wire, and the hotshoe in turn connects to the rest of the electronics via a pair of spring tabs.

The spring tabs are visible in the photo I took during disassembly. near the top front of the camera. The back of the PC socket looks like this:

Dead Link Removed

When I first tried disassembling mine, I thought perhaps the PC socket held the side on, so had a go at turning it. If someone was more persistent than me, they've likely broken the wire behind it that joins it to the hotshoe.

 

[tkamiya]

Thank you.

I have a bit of a problem. After removing the power grip, I realize, the strap "thing" is different on the right side. It has a bit of protrusion to it that I am not able to remove the strap clip. What do I do here? Do I even need to remove this side to open the other side? (the side with flash connection)

 

[tkamiya]

Suzy,

Never mind my comment above. The answer was NO. I was able to take the flash side off without doing anything to the other side. Thank you very much for replying to my initial question and also having the disassemble pictorial. I was able to disassemble mine, find the problem, and repair it. The problem I had was flash not always firing - and sometimes firing when not supposed to. The problem was the screw that holds the wire to the center pin was lose. The lug for the wire was sometimes making connection, sometimes not, and sometimes shorting to the ground.

Yay!