Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/06/21
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]In a message dated 6/21/99 7:01:10 PM Pacific Daylight Time, lesliek@oriental.com.hk writes: << Subj: Re: [Leica] battery cover - Paging Mr. Tom A. Tom, >I received my M6 slotted battery cover last Friday, from Leica. Nice. I >will only use wooden nickels in the slot. Maybe its a good time to get to the drawing board and bring to life an exquisitely machined, titanium finished, with built-in flip lever battery cover with color-matching to Softies as an option. Millions in the making!! Leslie K >> Leslie, It is not as if the idea has not occurred to me! Almost since the inception of the M6 I have been trying to get Leica to make a battery cover that has an On/Off switch on it and a coin slot too (all my battery covers are slightly chewed up by the inappropriate use of pliers to unscrew them!). Leica solution to the problem was to put the Off switch on the shutterspeed dial of the M6 TTL! It should be a simple matter of having the sliding switch on the battery cover breaking the ground connection. To use you just slide it in place, use the M6 as usual and when you don't need it, slide it onto off position (the diodes in the M6 and the "Vegas Strip" in the TTL is highly irritating when you are shooting in very low light, it almost blinds you with an aggressive burst of red when you are trying to focus in a low contrast, low light situation - when you need the precise focus the most!). Does anyone on the LUG have circuit schematics of the M6 and/or M6 TTL cameras? It should be possible to design and build a simple switching mechanism and battery cover to replace the current one. I can probably figure out the mechanics of it, as well as the manufacturing thereof, but electronics is a "black art" to me! An alternative to an On/Off switch would be a small, pressure-activated switch on the battery cover (where the vulcanite now resides). You would depress this switch and do your meter reading, release the pressure and happily shoot, without red lights in the viewfinder anymore. Of course we could always relocated the "Red Dot" to that switch and actually have it serve more of a purpose than covering up a screw head - and it would make the M6 look like a M4P and you could impress other Leica users by nonchalantly stating, "The exposure is 1/15 between f 1 and 1,2". All the best, Tom A