A couple of days ago I said to ACG that over the past few weeks I have torn down, cleaned, and reassembled the leaf shutters on at least a dozen metal bodied Argus cameras.
Well, today I did another, this one a C-four with Geiss mod lens mount.
The shutter leaves LOOKED very clean, but it seemed a little hesitant at high speeds. So I took it apart.
Lo and behold, the spacer plates all were a bit soaked with residual oil, from someone's previous attempt to "lubricate." Cleaning each part by hand took care of that.
Midway through the process I stopped, got a digital Pentax, and shot these images. They hint at my work techniques. I now like to use blue disposable shop towels for the job, laying out the parts in exact order and cleaning small parts with cut up pieces of towel wet with lighter fluid.
The job really needs to be done with shutter open so that the pieces do not fall apart, thus the B setting and locking cable release.
There are generally seven leaves in there, the last two go on top of the first two, this is needed to seal out light when closed.
The cut off toothpicks keep all parts aligned while assembling until the screws are re-installed, this is especially important for those 5 little brass spacer washers.
This is a later series of shutter, with 5 screw design. Early designs had about 15 screws, first set go in from the inside of the body to hold the first spacer plate, the second set of 5 hold the blade assembly to that first metal plate, and the third set of 5 hold the lens mount to the assembly.
But like I said, this one is a 5 screw design, the screws go in from the front and hold everything together in a stack, including the lens mount.
By the way, different cameras can have different numbers of spacer plates, that is part of how body and shutter are calibrated to correct focus with the lens.
Operation was a success.
Start to finish, it took me one hour.
