{"id":20217,"date":"2021-03-26T01:15:44","date_gmt":"2021-03-26T05:15:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/?p=20217"},"modified":"2021-03-26T01:20:26","modified_gmt":"2021-03-26T05:20:26","slug":"dont-give-me-the-gears","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/dont-give-me-the-gears\/","title":{"rendered":"don’t give me the gears"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Some gears in my Exakta VXIIa<\/p><\/div>\n

Toronto<\/strong>. A short time after moving back to Montreal,\u00a0I joined the company Camera Club and offered a shutter and lens test. This was with good reason. My trusty Exakta VXIIa had shown a wavy anomaly in my fast shutter tests in the late 1960s.<\/p>\n

To be safe, I bought an older Exakta Varex before carefully taking apart my VXIIa. Photographs like the one at left helped me reassemble the camera so it still worked. Looking at its innards, I saw that one brass shutter stop was nearly severed with a pile of brass shavings nearby. Looking more closely, I was appalled at how thin the large gears were. Sadly, I carefully reassembled it and set it aside – my first collectible camera (I still have it today).<\/p>\n

A few years later, in the summer of 1972, I bought my first Leica – a model M4. Years later in Toronto I had the opportunity to see the shutter assembly of my M4. A hole burnt in a\u00a0shutter curtain in Montreal (my fault) was to be repaired by Wild-Leitz in Toronto. Instead, unbeknownst to me, the Montreal Leica dealer sent my camera to another less expensive repair facility in Toronto (Swiss Cross).<\/p>\n

While on a visit home, the camera failed again. This time, I took it directly to Wild-Leitz to complain. There, I was shown the difference between their repair and one by Swiss-Cross: Disassembly requires the lens mount to be removed and to do so means the black wax-like material in the top lens mount screw socket has to be removed and replaced. The tiny stamp embossing the material is a cross like a plus sign for Swiss Cross, and an upside down \u00a3 symbol for Wild-Leitz.<\/p>\n

Factory fresh unassembled Leicas are embossed with an upright<\/em> \u00a3 symbol. Wild-Leitz graciously repaired my shutter at their cost of parts and labour and gave me the removed shutter drum which has a pin that had been previously bent by a clumsy technician. The camera has been fine ever since.<\/p>\n

Note: The name of the post stems from a typically Canadian expression<\/a> which I used from time to time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Toronto. A short time after moving back to Montreal,\u00a0I joined the company Camera Club and offered a shutter and lens test. This was with good reason. My trusty Exakta VXIIa had shown a wavy anomaly in my fast shutter tests … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[835,3386,58,61,1709,677,679,1702],"class_list":["post-20217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-camera","tag-exakta","tag-focal-plane-shutter","tag-history","tag-leica","tag-m4","tag-repair","tag-shutter","tag-vxiia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20217"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20217\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20234,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20217\/revisions\/20234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}