Three days on a sticky shutter button that was just a bad screw

Had a Canon AE-1 come in with a shutter button that felt like it was catching on something. I spent three whole afternoons cleaning contacts, checking springs, even swapped the whole button assembly from a donor body. Turns out the screw holding the plastic top plate was just a tiny bit too long and rubbing against the mechanism inside. Filed it down 2mm and it worked perfect. Has anyone else spent way too long on a problem that had a simple fix?

3 comments

3 Comments

charles7202d ago

Three days wasted on a 2mm fix, rough. I had a similar thing with a Pentax K1000 where a loose screw in the battery compartment was shorting the meter. Took me forever to find it.

taylor_patel2d ago

Dropped a screw from a Canonet QL17 into the abyss of my carpet once. Spent four hours on my hands and knees with a flashlight, found a dead spider and three stale Cheerios but no screw. Finally gave up and used a paperclip as a makeshift battery contact. Thing worked for like six months before I found the real screw stuck to a magnet in my tool box. Classic.

aaron8801d ago

Paperclip fix is a rite of passage for any camera tinkerer honestly. That said a loose screw shorting the meter is the kind of dumb problem that makes you wanna throw the whole camera out the window. It's always the tiny stuff that takes the longest to spot because you just assume it's something bigger. Bet you felt like a genius when you finally found it though. I still check battery compartments first on any used camera I buy now out of pure paranoia.