Simple DIY Camera Cleaning and Repair2009-09-19 23:07:40
How-To

If you’ve read my blog, you probably already know that I’m obsessed with old cameras.  Whenever I have free time, I go to flea markets, yard and estate sales and hunt for old mechanical film cameras.  Unfortunately, it is very rare to find one in pristine condition, and after spending hundreds of dollars on having those “old beaters” repaired and CLA’d (Cleaned, Lubed and Adjusted) by professional repair shops, I decided to learn how to repair those little mechanical wonders myself.


I know that in this day and age most people prefer digital cameras.  As a professional photographer I use high-end digital SLRs to shoot weddings, but there is something absolutely magical about film.  Even if you don’t develop it yourself, getting a developed role from a minilab is like opening a little present.


So if you find an old Pentax, Nikon, or Canon in your grandfather’s attic, don’t rush to throw it away.  If you are willing to spend 20 dollars and a few hours of your time, chances are that you can enjoy your camera for many more years.

Canon Canonet QL 17



A few days ago I picked up a nice little Canon Canonet QL-17 at a flea market and would like to illustrate how to do basic cleaning and minor repair to get this camera working and shooting again.

Canon Canonet QL 17

Canon Canonet QL-17 Rangefinder with film door open


The biggest problem with these old cameras is that the light seals around the edges of the film door disintegrate with time and turn into black sticky goo.  Without the seals, the light leaks into the camera and fogs the film. 

 

Damaged light seals

You can see the disintegrated light seals and black goo that they leave all over your camera.

If you shoot a roll of film through a camera with damaged light seals, most likely your film will have bright blotches on the developed negatives.

Example of a fogged negative from camera with a light leak


Taken with a Soviet-made Fed 5 rangefinder (Leica knock-off).  The bottom light seal was completely gone in the right-bottom corner.


If you take your camera to a repair facility, a simple CLA will cost you about 100 dollars.  You can easily do it yourself in a few hours.
To clean an old camera and to replace damaged seals, you would need the following items:

 

  • Nail polish remover
  • Rubbing alcohol
  • Q-tips
  • A couple of wooden sticks used by nail technicians to clean under nails – they are thin round sticks about 6-7 inches long and have flattened ends.
  • A few small sponges
  • Replacement seals.  You can buy a camera seal kit on eBay for about $7-12 dollars.  Check out Jon Goodman`s eBay store - http://myworld.ebay.com/interslice

 

Be extremely careful with nail polish remover – it will discolor pretty much anything that you spill it on.  I usually work on a plastic tray to prevent any harmful spills.

 

  • Pour a little bit of nail polish in a small dish
  • Open your camera’s film door and remove the black plate on the inside of the door.  This plate is used to keep film flat.  Gently pull the plate up and it will easily pop off.

Removing film pressure plate from film camera

  • Dip a Q-tip in a nail polish remover and gently rub it on the light seals.  Change Q-tips often, otherwise you’ll just end up smudging the black goo from the light seals all over the place.  Be very careful not to drip nail polish remover anywhere on the camera except for the grooves where the light seals are attached.
  • Some of the seals are very stubborn, so that’s where those wooden sticks I mentioned before come in handy.  Dip the flat end of a stick in nail polish remover and scrape off whatever seals you could not get with Q-tips.  Make sure you clean off the goo off the end of the stick after each pass.

Removing old light seals with wooden sticks

  • Once all the goo is off, dip a few Q-tips in rubbing alcohol and clean off the grooves where old light seals used to be.
  • Dilute rubbing alcohol with water (about a 50% solution).  Wet a small sponge in the alcohol solution, wring it out so that the sponge is still wet but not dripping and wipe off the entire surface of the camera (except for the glass parts of the lens). 
  • Dip a Q-tip in rubbing alcohol and carefully clean out the lens between the aperture and focus rings.  Rotate the focus ring to make sure that the lens extends as far as it can so you could clean it.


If you are reconditioning an SLR, you might have to do a little bit more work.  SLRs (Singe Lens Reflex) cameras have a mirror that allows you to see and focus through the lens.  When you press the shutter release button to take a photograph, the mirror flips up at the same time as the shutter opens, allowing light to fall on a frame of film.  Above the mirror, there are usually one or two strips of foam that dampen the sound and vibration of the mirror flapping up and down. 


You have to be incredibly careful replacing those because it is very easy to damage the mirror.  If you don’t have steady hands and don’t feel comfortable replacing those strips yourself, just leave them alone – they are not going to affect your photos.  However, if you are brave and careful, you can fix those as well.


When I do delicate work like that, I prefer placing the camera on a tripod to keep it steady.  Since I repair cameras often, I took apart an old tripod and bolted it down to my workbench.  However, you don’t need to go that crazy.  Any steady tripod will do the job.  If you only have a small and light tripod, you can place the center column in a vice to keep it from shaking and moving.  Alternatively, you can weigh down your tripod by attaching a heavy bag to the bottom of the center column.

 

Camera (Zenit E) on Bogen tripod

 

  • Place your camera on a tripod
  • Remove the lens.  On cameras such as Pentax, Zenit, Praktica, early Leicas and a few others, you can simply unscrew the lens.  Nikons, Minoltas, Canons, Olympus and other cameras have bayonet mounts.  If you are facing the camera, you will usually find a button to the right of the lens.  Press the button and turn the lens to remove it.
  • Tilt your camera on your tripod until you can see the strips above the mirror.

Foam above SLR mirror

Strip of foam above SLR mirror

 

  • Do not use nail polish remover on the “mirror” strips – if it drips on the surface of the mirror, it will damage it irreparably.
  • Use a wooden stick dipped in rubbing alcohol (make sure that it does not drip) to scrape off the foam strips.  Clean the area with an alcohol-soaked Q-tip (again, make sure that it does not drip).

Once you have removed old seals, wipe off all the spots where you used nail polish or rubbing alcohol thoroughly with a clean, dry cloth.  Just in case, let the camera dry for about an hour.
Take new light seals from the kit you bought on eBay.  They are self-adhesive, so you don’t need any glue.  Attach the new seals to all the spots where you removed old ones.


Congratulations, you’ve just resealed an old camera.

Some old cameras, mostly rangefinders and TLRs (Twin-Lens Reflex) cameras have leaf shutters.  Instead of a metal or cloth gate that opens vertically or horizontally when you press the shutter-release button, these cameras have a series of interlocking leaves that create a round opening when shutter-release button is pressed.  When a camera had not been used in a long time, the oil on those leaves thickens and they sometimes stick together. 


To test if your shutter is working properly, you need to take a few snaps at slow shutter speeds.  Set your aperture dial to the smallest number available.  With your film door open (and no film in the camera), set the shutter speed dial on “B”.  “B” stands for bulb and will keep the shutter open as long as you keep the shutter-release button pressed.

Shutter and aperture settings

As you can see, the shutter speed is set to “B” and the aperture is set to 1.7 (the widest aperture available on this lens)


Lift the camera to your eye level and look at the shutter leaves.  Press the shutter release and hold it down.  Make sure that the leaves open all the way.  Let go of the shutter release button.  Repeat these steps with the next slowest shutter speed.  Make sure that the shutter closes all the way after you let go of the shutter release button.  If it does, chances are that everything works fine.  The shutter speeds might still not be very accurate, but film is a fairly forgiving media.


If your shutter does not open or close all the way, than you have a problem.  The proper way to fix it is to take the shutter assembly apart and clean the leaves.  However, if you don’t know what you are doing you will most likely turn your camera into a paperweight.  Here’s an easy hack to fix a stuck leaf shutter.  You will need a pipette (an eye dropper) and a bit of cigarette lighter fluid.  Make sure you are using cigarette lighter fluid and NOT the kind of lighter fluid made for lighting a grill.

 

  • Place your camera on a tripod and tilt it so that the lens is facing down (pointing at the floor).  Make sure that the camera body is perfectly parallel to the floor.  If your tripod cannot tilt the camera at such an angle, place it on a flat surface lens down and prop it up with something so that it does not move.
  • Open the camera’s film door.
  • Set the shutter speed to the slowest speed above “B”.
  • Put one drop of lighter fluid on the shutter leaves.  Be careful not to get it on the lens’ glass.
  • Wait for about 30 seconds and press the shutter-release button a few times to make sure that the lighter fluid spreads evenly across the surface of shutter’s leaves.  
  • Try taking a few shots on slow shutter speeds and on “B” and make sure that the shutter opens and closes all the way.  If it does not, put one more drop of lighter fluid on the leaves and repeat steps 4 and 5.

 

Leaf shutter closed (Kodak Tourist folder camera)

Leaf shutter closed (it’s kind of hard to see because of the bellows, but I did not have another leaf-shutter camera on hand).

Leaf shutter open (Kodak Tourist folder camera)
Leaf shutter open


Hopefully, after putting in all this work into your camera, you can load a roll of film and take photos to your heart’s content.  If you decide you actually want to tinker with your camera’s innards and try to do more complicated repairs, I highly recommend the following books:


Good luck and have fun…

Comments

Creating auto-resizable HTML textarea2009-03-18 00:00:00
How-To

A few days ago I needed to create an auto-resizing textarea.  Basically, it is an HTML textarea that changes its height based on the amount of text a user types in.  It resizes real-time, as the user types.

I found a few solutions online, but most of them weren`t very accurate.  They had a bunch of quirks because of browser differences and kept adding more lines than was necessary.  My solution is a little slower, because instead of counting characters it actually counts whole words by splitting the contents of a textarea into a word array.  However, it is very accurate as far as adding the correct number of new lines.  I tested it on IE 7, Safari, Google Chrome, and Firefox 3 on Windows and Safari and Firefox 3 on MacOS X (10.5).

ATTENTION:  If you are using this in ASP.NET, you need to use Rows and Columns attributes (instead of rows and cols).  If you are using stylesheets (CSS) to set the width of your textarea, make sure that the CSS width actually corresponds to the width specified in the "cols" attribute.  The lines are counted using the value of the "cols" attribute, so if your CSS width value is greater or less than the width specified by columns, the textarea will not resize correctly.

<script language="javascript">

function resizeTextArea(obj){
    var r = 1; /* set initial number of rows */
    var txt = new String(obj.value).replace(/ /g, " "); /* replace TAB characters */
    obj.value = txt;
    var arr = new String(obj.value).split(" "); /* split text into array by ENTER */
    r = arr.length; /* get number of hard returns */
    txt = new String(obj.value).replace(/ /g, " "); /* replace ENTER characters */
   
    var i = 0;
    arr = txt.split(" "); /* split text into word array */
    txt = "";

    /* count the number of words that would fit on a single line in textarea
    Always look one word ahead to predict when the next line begins */
    if(arr.length > 1){
        for(i=0;i<arr.length - 1;i++){
            txt = txt + " " + arr[i];
            if((txt.length >= obj.cols) || (new String(txt + " " + arr[i+1]) >= obj.cols)){
                txt = "";
                r = r + 1; /* add rows to the textarea */
            }
        }
    }
    obj.rows = r;
}


window.onload = function(){
    var i = 0;
    var j = 0;
    var objectcollection = null;
    /* resize all textareas in a form to fit the amount of text */
    for(i=0;i<document.forms.length;i++){
        objectcollection = document.forms[i].getElementsByTagName(`textarea`);
        for(j=0;j<objectcollection.length;j++){
            if(objectcollection[j]){
                resizeTextArea(objectcollection[j]);
            }
        }
    }
}

</script>

 

<body>

<form name="someForm">
<textarea name="someTextarea" id="someTextarea" rows="2" columns="60" onkeyup="resizeTextArea(this);"></textarea>
</form>

</body>

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Right-Click Event in ActionScript 32009-03-10 00:00:00
How-To

Unfortunately, ActionScript 3 can detect a mouse right-click event only in Adobe Air, but not in Flash. For the last few months I`ve been working on an interactive web application (I cannot get into more details than that), and I got to a point where detecting right-click event became pretty crucial to the intuitiveness of the user interface. After doing a lot of research and going down about 10 dead-end paths, I finally came up with a solution that works.

/* Create custom right-click menu */

private function createRightClickMenu():ContextMenu {

var mn:ContextMenu = new ContextMenu();
mn.hideBuiltInItems(); /* hide default Flash items */

/* You can add your menu items here,
or skip this part if you don`t need a right-click menu */
var mi1:ContextMenuItem = new ContextMenuItem("Hello");
mn.customItems.push(mi1); /* End adding custom items */

/* This is where you actually capture the right-click
event by adding an event listener to the
entire right-click menu object */
mn.addEventListener(ContextMenuEvent.MENU_SELECT, detectNodeRightClick);
return mn;


}


private function detectNodeRightClick(event:ContextMenuEvent):void{

/* Do whatever needs to happen on the right-click event here */ trace(event.contextMenuOwner);

}

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