I have been looking in my cabinet the other day, to check on what camera / lens needs to be sent for repair, CLA, whatever. Several cameras are in dire need to be overhauled or otherwise given a good scrub and adjusted, if nothing else. Among them, my Olympus of old, a good and reliable OM10. It started to creak when I operate the film winder, and although it did the job, the sound of that creak worried me; when something sounds like that, it’s repair time.
One of the lenses I use with this camera is a very nice Vivitar (OM) 28/2.8, which has served me well for the good part of the last 20 yrs. The aperture ring had a hard time turning and clicking in position, the lens had a bit of a haze, and the helical focus ring was working with hiccups. To the repair shop, this one too.
A Kodak Retina I (013) and a Retina Ia (015) were about to follow suit, just for general CLA and whatnot, when I had a brief look at my Chinese TLR, the Seagull 4A I presented here in this article. This camera has served me faithfully, but it had several issues: focus screen very dark, almost unusable, focusing knob hard to turn, shutter speeds not clicking right in their respective position, aperture lever the same. And to make things interesting, the shutter became stuck, and the shutter release button became loose. Packed it and sent it, together with the OM.
The repair shop I started to use last year is providing very good service, at least for the cameras he serviced for me. He does good work, and not for prices that would cost me an arm and a leg. The cameras in question went to the shop and in a couple of days he told me both of them had been serviced. These photographs are sent from the shop, in real time, when he was doing the job. Pretty fast too, I’d say.
I am quite happy with the work he did, and once the cameras are back to my cabinet, they will see some action. I already took some film out of the fridge, Kodak Ektar 100 for the OM and some Ilford Delta 100 for the TLR.