Background/problem: This was my go to camera a couple of decades ago and I recently picked it up again. I recall I was just starting to have some issues, but not a lot of details. Loading a roll of film in, the counter was not reseting to "S", so still showed frame 2 or 3 or some such thing. I cranked it forward, fired, cranked, fired, cranked fired to move the film up to what I guessed would be a safe place to start (it was). When I got to 12, it wound out through the rest of the roll so I only got 6 or 7 shots. I should add that it was pretty "crunchy/scrapey" when winding... not hanging up really, but I could hear and feel metal on metal somehow.
Several good videos/tutorials on accessing the winder gears out there on youtube and such, so I dove in and popped the side off. I could clearly see where the large crank "wheel" was scraping against the metal side cover. That metal side cover (the piece that covers all the gears) is really thin and bends easily. It appeared that the camera had taken a whack around the crank somewhere and the dent in that cover piece was now contacting the crank "wheel". I kinda punched the metal back closer to it's original shape around the opening for the crank. Looking at the counter wheel and why it wasn't resetting, it seemed to work just fine with the cover off, but when I put the cover back in place, I could see that another dent in the cover was contacting the counter wheel a little bit and causing it to hang up. Again... kind punched out the dents/shape and that resolved it. Finally... when I put things back together and tried winding a test roll, now the counter wouldn't budge off the "S". Taking everything apart... now the metal side was binding in a different place on the counter wheel, so thumped those back to shape and reassembled everything. Winding and shooting a test roll now worked as expected, and as a bonus the crank is now nice and smooth.
Just sharing/posting, as in all the Yashicamat repair stuff out there, I didn't see where anyone had run into this side denting issue as far as a cause of winding/counter issues.
Here's a pic where I put some blue tape on the couple of areas where dents caused issues:
Several good videos/tutorials on accessing the winder gears out there on youtube and such, so I dove in and popped the side off. I could clearly see where the large crank "wheel" was scraping against the metal side cover. That metal side cover (the piece that covers all the gears) is really thin and bends easily. It appeared that the camera had taken a whack around the crank somewhere and the dent in that cover piece was now contacting the crank "wheel". I kinda punched the metal back closer to it's original shape around the opening for the crank. Looking at the counter wheel and why it wasn't resetting, it seemed to work just fine with the cover off, but when I put the cover back in place, I could see that another dent in the cover was contacting the counter wheel a little bit and causing it to hang up. Again... kind punched out the dents/shape and that resolved it. Finally... when I put things back together and tried winding a test roll, now the counter wouldn't budge off the "S". Taking everything apart... now the metal side was binding in a different place on the counter wheel, so thumped those back to shape and reassembled everything. Winding and shooting a test roll now worked as expected, and as a bonus the crank is now nice and smooth.
Just sharing/posting, as in all the Yashicamat repair stuff out there, I didn't see where anyone had run into this side denting issue as far as a cause of winding/counter issues.
Here's a pic where I put some blue tape on the couple of areas where dents caused issues: