Just so nobody thinks that home camera repair is all fun and wine, there are the occasional FAIL moments.

My Lomo Lubitel 166 was in need of some work – when I got it, it was filthy (“refurbished” my arse) and the Bulb mode did not work. A simple cleaning was easy enough and I was sort of prepared to live without Bulb mode since it didn’t come with a cable release socket anyways. (Though wierdly, it actually came with a cable release.)

The final straw came when I had loaded it up with the second roll of film, then the back flopped open and ruined a couple exposures. At that point, I figured I’d fix the Bulb mode and see about doing something to improve the way the back closed.

Repairing Bulb mode proved to be pretty simple. But putting it back together… well there was the kicker. I could get it back together, but the shutter wouldn’t cock. Or I could get it so the shutter cocked, but it wouldn’t go back together. It was frustrating. I fiddled with it for a few hours then gave up and set it aside for a week or two.

Last night I tried again, but found myself to be still frustrated – I have no idea how they hooked the cocking gear to the winding gear. I can hook them up in a dozen different ways, but none of them work.

In frustration I “removed” one side of the camera, to see if I could get at some of the gears. I got at the gears, but still no luck. The camera body is mainly plastic, and the outer bits were ‘welded’ in place so getting at the gears meant breaking some of the outer casing.

At this stage, it’s pretty much a write-off. All I can do now is scavenge it for parts. Sigh. Well, you can’t win them all. And I did get one roll of film through it. Still… after spending 29 years waiting in a box, it found me, shot one roll of film, then I killed it.

Mind you, a little failure is good now and then, helps to keep us mindful of consequences and helps us learn.

After all my recent successes, I decided to do some work on one of my new favorites – the Zeiss Ikon Nettar. This camera is 60 years old, made in 1949 it is a medium format 6×6 folding camera. With bellows and everything, it’s a real beauty, and in almost perfect condition! The only problem was the viewfinder was totally fogged up. Not surprising if it’s got 60 years of gunk in it.

Unscrewing the top plate.

Fortunately, cleaning a viewfinder on one of these cameras is a fairly easy task. Just remove the screw that holds down the winding knob, then remove the screw that’s underneath the winding knob. On the other side, there’s one more screw, and then the top plate just lifts right off. The only caveat is to be careful not to lose the two buttons – the shutter release and the opening latch, are ‘loose’ and held in place only by the top plate.

With the top plate off, the front and rear viewfinder lenses are easily accessable. The glass is only held in place by ‘friction’, being pressed into a lightweight metal frame. This means it’s easy to dislodge them if you aren’t careful.

Once I had access to the lenses, I just used a couple q-tips and a drop of windex, to wipe away the grime. Once it was done, the viewfinder was clear as crystal. It was a snap then to just put back the buttons and top plate, then tighten the screws down. Only about 10 minutes for the entire procedure, and now my Zeiss Ikon Nettar is as good as new!

The Nettar without its top plate.

So I’ve tried a few times to process colour film at home in Black & White chemicals. And I’ve had a few failures. It started out as a lark, then became a bit of a challenge and a learning process. In the meantime, I also got a newer, better scanner that has a bit more oomph in its transparency adapter and can better manage the darker negs that colour film produce. (Darker due to a built-in orange mask.)

My most-recent attempt actually produced workable results! Pitty I wasn’t trying to take good pictures.

What happened was, I picked up one of those disposable / one-use cameras. It was cheap, a ‘store-brand’, and mostly I wanted to take it apart to get at the shutter assembly and the electronic flash components. So I had 27 frames of film to piss away, and I did just that, snapping here there and whatever. The film was ISO 800 which is very fast (for me at least, I used to think 100 was ‘standard’ and 400 was ‘very fast’; now 400 seems standard.)

Anyhow, so at the end of the day I had managed to waste the whole roll and took the camera apart to get it out. The no-name camera contained a roll of no-name film. I had been hoping for some clue as to who made it, so I’d have some hope of knowing what to expect. No luck. So I snipped off a bit of the leader then loaded the rest into my developing tank.

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Hey, how hard can it be, right? Today we’re going to be working on an ‘antique’, a ~37 year old Canonet GIII QL17, mechanical manual-focus rangefinder camera.

First thing is, make sure before you get started that you’re fully prepared. Have all your tools ready, any spare parts or supplies that you’ll need, and for goodness sake, make sure your beer is handy. A clean and tidy well-lit work area is important too, though in a pinch, just shove stuff off to one side of your dimly-lit desk and keep a flashlight handy for when you need some light.

Step two, dive right on in. Cameras are fairly simple things, as you can see in the pictures. Really it’s just a pound of metal and glass. It only seems complicated because they take that pound of metal and make it into about eleventy-million little springs and levers and ratcheting doo-hickeys. At the end of the day though, metal is still just metal, and glass is still just glass. Except when they make it out of some funky rare-earth crystal stuff.

So once the camera is fixed, just put it back together by reversing the disassembly process.

That’s it – it’s just that easy.

I know I said I wasn’t going to try and process colour film in B&W chemicals any more. The problem is, I was reading and came across a clue as to what I did wrong. I didn’t fix it long enough – I read someone was fixing for 30 minutes to get good results. So armed with this new knowledge, I decided to give it another shot. I had two exposed rolls, and got a second reel for my tank so I can now process ruin film at twice the efficiency.

Well, it didn’t really turn out again. I don’t know what was wrong this time. Maybe I mixed the fixer too weak. I’ll have to go and read some more. The negs were still so dark (almost opaque) that I really had to push the scanner just to get an image out of them.

This time though I decided to go a little crazy with them. Instead of scanning them as black and white, I scanned in colour. And instead of trying to get realistic images, I decided to just yank the sliders and dials this way and that, I let each frame inspire me.

Oh – and I almost forgot! All these pictures were taken with a pinhole camera! I was not just testing the home film processing, but the roll itself was a test of using a pinhole instead of a lens.