I am such a klutz!

This is the Konica Auto S2 that I received last week. On Thursday, I dropped it. The camera landed on one corner and apparently the wind lever took the brunt of the impact. It sheared off the tiny screw threads holding the lever in place. What's left of the fastener is that small brass piece down inside the rewind shaft - the one with two flats on either side.

After some colorful language, silently expressed inside my head as Mary and Lyndsay were in the room, I thought of a solution. I'd seen another S2 at a flea market in Tulsa. It was inoperative, so I'd go buy it as a donor camera for parts. This was gonna be easy!

At the flea market, I found the S2 quickly, then spent some time untangling it from the other junker/clunker cameras. I found the booth owner and offered $5 it.

"What! I can't believe you'd insult me like that so early in the morning! The lens alone is worth $25!" He snatched the camera from my hand, turned on his heel, and walked away.

"For $25 I can get one that works," I said. The guy seemed genuinely angry so I left. But then I started thinking. If an S2 in very good condition fetches maybe $100 on E-bay, and he wants at least $25 for the broken one, it should cost roughly $75 for a repair at a shop. That still doesn't account for any other defects, rotted seals, or cleaning. So his apparent value for the camera is way out of line. And in the final analysis, it's only worth what someone is willing to pay for it.

I'm willing to pay five bucks. I'll probably go down there in a week or so and insult him again. It's one of my strong points, and I really kinda enjoy doing it.

I am a bad, bad man....(updated)

I went rooting about in a bin at a flea market, finding tons of old Kodaks, Polaroids, and for some odd reason, Minolta autofocus cameras, when I spied this way down on the bottom.



The battery leaked and corroded the battery compartment. Most of that is plastic so it shouldn't be a major problem. But I read Matt's Classic Cameras about repairing these, and his unit had corrosion all along the negative lead from the case, requiring replacement of the wire. There's a lovely photo on his site of the disassembled camera.


Of course, the seals are a gummy mess. At the bottom of this photo is a small roller that's part of the back. It's supposed to make winding a little smoother, and it's a nice touch on a camera that was meant as an inexpensive but decent quality photo taker in the days before the auto-focus, auto-everything camera killed off the rangefinder market.

Oh, there was also a Canon AF35ML in that bin. It's an automatic camera with a comparatively fast f 1.9 lens. I have one around here somewhere and I bought it new back in the 1980s. That model had two major problems. First, the battery compartment door had a tendency to break off. This was a shoddy design decision in what was a high end point and shoot. The other problem is the camera is gawdawful noisy! Honestly, I've never heard another one like it. It takes great pictures, but it's gratingly LOUD.

The one at the flea market had very badly corroded batteries. It went back into the bin.

(LATER)

I took the C35 apart this afternoon. It was worse than I expected.

This is the exposure mechanism inside the top cover. The rangefinder is to the right, and the frame counter is that wheel to the left. Those wires attached to the little white plastic box in the center come from the battery. See that gray blob at the end of the red wire? It's corrosion from battery fluid that traveled through the wire via capillary action. The wire will have to be replaced, but here's hoping the corrosive didn't find a way inside the exposure control mechanism, or this camera will just be a pretty paperweight.

But there's more. The battery compartment is plastic as I mentioned earlier. A pair of screws hold it in the cast aluminum camera body. One of them goes all the way through to the back of the camera, inside the film compartment. I found corrosion in there too. Hopefully, I'll be able to remove it with the assistance of some penetrating oil and maybe a soldering iron.

I can see some brackets that look like supports down inside the camera body. They're corroded. Most of the internal parts appear to be brass, though those corroded pieces may be steel.

Regardless, this camera is going to be a more involved project than I'd hoped. It's going to take a considerable amount of dis-assembly to fix this. I'm glad I only have five bucks in it.