[Astro-Baby]

Haha the first Minolta SRT I tried to fix needed restringing as the meter, aperture index setting and and shutter speed indicators are all driven off small pulleys, strings and springs.
I studied the workshop guide and it had some diagrams and instructions ‘simply put a knot in the string, lace it round the pulley wheel A, run the string under the roller B, through the spring collar C, route it around.....’ and so on. on an A4 page it all looked simple enough and I though ‘cant be harder than setting up the cams and valve timing on a V12’ then I took the lid off and realised the entire mechanism was about the size of a postage stamp. Hahahaha I just put the lid back on and sent it off to a tech.

I have kind of graduated since then (and have a pile of busted cameras as a diploma) but its like anything...you get better with practice.

What amazes me is these things could be handmade, be massively reliable and yet still cost so little back in the day. The engineering and design work is amazing but so is the build quality, literally hundreds of small parts all painstakingly assembled with amazing precision and attention to detail.
On top of that even with no servicing most of this stuff can still run if its been given even moderate care.

How many 40 year old cars are still running without a service...how many 40 year old anything is still going ?

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Last edited by Astro-Baby; 11-13-2020 at 04:03 PM.

[Sam_I_am]

Hopefully you can come up with a better replacement for your leatherette than camo colored felt.

P.S., thank you for the Hugo studios tip.

[Astro-Baby]

Oh dear, someone needs to be shot fir doing that job. I will most likely recover with something exotic like snakeskin.

[Sam_I_am]

How goes the battle?

[Astro-Baby]

Cant source a capacitor at the moment.....I thought this would be easy but its an odd value. I could do a pair in parallel but am wondering whay they chose what seems like a paper based capacitor.
Technically almost any capacitor of the same value should be ok but I havent worked in electronics for about 30 years so am a bit hazy on capacitors.

The cap in the pic is most likley a paper or plastic wrapped capacitor. I am betting on wax paper myself given its age and Given its a Very high capacitance of 1.5 F.

The designers must have chosen such a type for a reason otherwise they could have used a cheaper ceramic capacitor. Unfortunately the workshop manual doesnt say what the logic is.

In my heart I feel a8 am going to have to pull the entire board out and rebuild it with new components throughout as one of the ceramic capacitors inside seems to have a problem. Its hard to be sure but from the limited view it looks as if one of the smaller capacitors may have leaked inside.

This thing is turning into an endless chase and I am resigned to probably having to rebuild the entire camera from the top.

The workship guide is very detailed on how to take everything to bits but unfortunately doesnt give any fixes or test methods to determine whats at fault or any component listings to give values for stuff.

[Sam_I_am]

Sorry to hear that. It looks like you really did open a can of worms, like the saying goes.