I recently bought a Barnack's Leica in a severe crisis of GAS, you know. It was a IIIc sharkskin one. It came with an old Elmar 50mm, the one that ends with f18, and of course uncoated. In my defense, I have to say that it was relatively cheap. I suppose that the camera is around 1949 and the lens is about the late thirties. Finally I was going to be one more of the happy family of Leica owners (the cheap Leicas branch, I mean).
When I exposed my first reel, I had no complaints with the lens, but the camera curtains have pinholes. If you look at the curtains from the front of the camera you can't distinguish any one, but if you remove the housing and look through them with a strong light from the back, it's like the Milky Way at night. As the saying goes, the poor man goes to the store twice.
Of course, the obvious way of action would be to substitute the curtains, but I wasn't very happy with the idea. But, ¡no panic! There is plenty of information about how to seal the pinholes. Most of them advice to use liquid rubber. Actually this is the title of a video of Mkeno62 called "Repair the shutter curtain in Leica IIIf with liquid rubber" that I found in YouTube where Mikeno62 explains with all detail how to do the trick.
However, Mikeno62 didn't use liquid rubber, but a product of Panduro named PopUp Liner. Obviously every brand has its own distribution channels and this product isn't easily available in Spain, but a the end of the day PopUp Liner its a mere 3Dpaint. This kind of paint is designed to be used with cloth and when exposed to heat (oven or hair dryer) it expands some millimeters, hence its 3D denomination. As such, is easy to find here.
Anyway I decided to do a test before facing the "real thing"
I took a piece of thin cotton and tried several kinds of painting.
I painted this four patches and then I put a strong light behind and check its opacity.
The patch top-left is cloth painting. At the very beginning it was very promising, tight and opaque.
Bottom-left is again cloth painting diluted with 20% water. Little less opaque.
Bottom-right is another kind of a very thick cloth marker.
Finally, the winner, at the top-right is 3D Paint, it was really opaque from the very beginning. It's blue for no other reason that it was what they had in the shop.
The result that you are seeing is a picture through a window of the cloth-test let dry for two days. Funny thing is that cloth-painting and cloth-market srank a lot when dried, and they are no more light tight. However 3D paint remains mostly opaque. Once dried the cloth-test remains very flexible in all patches, so this wasn't to be a concern.
Don't use this kind of paint.
Use this, instead.
In his video, Mikeno62 removes the housing, and paints from the back of the camera. I did more or less the same. Instead of a spatula I found more convenient to use a brush. Surprisingly, 3Dpaint blue color is a helper that lets you to see where actually are your strokes.
One of the advantages of removing the housing is that you can see pinholes with a powerful light. And you can use it when painting to locate where exactly they are.
There were pinholes in the first and second curtain, this last the worst by difference. To do the work I keep the light on through the curtain in order to see the pinholes. Even when I painted the whole surface, I double check the places with original pinholes while trying to keep the paint layer as thin as posible.
After that, I let them dry a day, and checked for pinholes with a light, as usually. Only when I checked that no one remained I mounted the housing again.
Regarding the shutter speeds, I measured them before and after. No changes, but in both cases they were generally slow but consistent; only at 1/1000 didn't work properly, but nothing that I can't stand with.
The whole process was fairly painless -once that you rehearsal what to do- and now I have a camera to take with me in my walks instead of a camera opting to be the queen of the bookshelf.
Obviously, some day I'll have to take my Leica to the mechanic, but this is going to be another Story.
Meanwhile, I thought that somebody could benefit from my trials, and myself I'm looking at the pinholes in my FED with new eyes!
When I exposed my first reel, I had no complaints with the lens, but the camera curtains have pinholes. If you look at the curtains from the front of the camera you can't distinguish any one, but if you remove the housing and look through them with a strong light from the back, it's like the Milky Way at night. As the saying goes, the poor man goes to the store twice.
Of course, the obvious way of action would be to substitute the curtains, but I wasn't very happy with the idea. But, ¡no panic! There is plenty of information about how to seal the pinholes. Most of them advice to use liquid rubber. Actually this is the title of a video of Mkeno62 called "Repair the shutter curtain in Leica IIIf with liquid rubber" that I found in YouTube where Mikeno62 explains with all detail how to do the trick.
However, Mikeno62 didn't use liquid rubber, but a product of Panduro named PopUp Liner. Obviously every brand has its own distribution channels and this product isn't easily available in Spain, but a the end of the day PopUp Liner its a mere 3Dpaint. This kind of paint is designed to be used with cloth and when exposed to heat (oven or hair dryer) it expands some millimeters, hence its 3D denomination. As such, is easy to find here.
Anyway I decided to do a test before facing the "real thing"
I took a piece of thin cotton and tried several kinds of painting.
I painted this four patches and then I put a strong light behind and check its opacity.
The patch top-left is cloth painting. At the very beginning it was very promising, tight and opaque.
Bottom-left is again cloth painting diluted with 20% water. Little less opaque.
Bottom-right is another kind of a very thick cloth marker.
Finally, the winner, at the top-right is 3D Paint, it was really opaque from the very beginning. It's blue for no other reason that it was what they had in the shop.
The result that you are seeing is a picture through a window of the cloth-test let dry for two days. Funny thing is that cloth-painting and cloth-market srank a lot when dried, and they are no more light tight. However 3D paint remains mostly opaque. Once dried the cloth-test remains very flexible in all patches, so this wasn't to be a concern.
Don't use this kind of paint.
Use this, instead.
In his video, Mikeno62 removes the housing, and paints from the back of the camera. I did more or less the same. Instead of a spatula I found more convenient to use a brush. Surprisingly, 3Dpaint blue color is a helper that lets you to see where actually are your strokes.
One of the advantages of removing the housing is that you can see pinholes with a powerful light. And you can use it when painting to locate where exactly they are.
There were pinholes in the first and second curtain, this last the worst by difference. To do the work I keep the light on through the curtain in order to see the pinholes. Even when I painted the whole surface, I double check the places with original pinholes while trying to keep the paint layer as thin as posible.
After that, I let them dry a day, and checked for pinholes with a light, as usually. Only when I checked that no one remained I mounted the housing again.
Regarding the shutter speeds, I measured them before and after. No changes, but in both cases they were generally slow but consistent; only at 1/1000 didn't work properly, but nothing that I can't stand with.
The whole process was fairly painless -once that you rehearsal what to do- and now I have a camera to take with me in my walks instead of a camera opting to be the queen of the bookshelf.
Obviously, some day I'll have to take my Leica to the mechanic, but this is going to be another Story.
Meanwhile, I thought that somebody could benefit from my trials, and myself I'm looking at the pinholes in my FED with new eyes!
