Vent: That shutter release cable that took me 4 hours to fix

Got an old Nikon F2 in last Thursday with a sticky shutter release. Simple job, right? Took the whole thing apart, cleaned everything, put it back together. Still stuck. Did that two more times before I noticed a tiny burr on the release lever inside the barrel. Filed it down smooth with a jewelers file and it worked perfect. Total time 4.5 hours for what should have been a 30 minute fix. Anyone else ever chase a ghost like that on a simple repair?

3 comments

3 Comments

jenny_lane121d ago

Oh man, isn't that always how it goes? The simple jobs turn into the biggest headaches. I had the exact same thing happen on a Mamiya RB67 once. The film advance lever was just a little stiff, so I figured I'd give it a quick clean. Six hours later I had the whole thing spread across my desk and found a tiny piece of old dried up glue stuck in the winding mechanism. You think you're just doing a simple fix and then you're chasing some tiny imperfection for hours. It's so frustrating but also kind of satisfying when you finally find it. Makes you wonder how many times the previous owner just lived with that little burr before you came along.

fionafoster13h ago

Ha! Oh man, I feel this so hard. I once spent an entire afternoon on a "quick fix" for a sticky shutter button on an old Pentax, only to realize the previous owner had just been using way too much Windex on the body and it had gummed everything up.

wood.uma1d ago

Hang on, but isnt that burr probably a factory defect? Makes me wonder if Nikon had a bad batch of those release levers back then and some cameras just shipped with that little hangup from day one. You mightve fixed a problem that was there since it left the showroom floor in the 70s. Kinda wild to think a camera could work fine for fifty years with a tiny built-in flaw nobody ever caught.