[Leica] Another 50 for the Jeffster

[msmall at infionline.net (Marc James Small)]

At 05:28 PM 3/30/06 -0500, Jeffery Smith wrote:
>Van Stelten took hours trying to get the gummy 50-year-old grease out of
my Contax shutter when he was giving it a CLA. I have read that the shutter
suffers from the metal crystalizing over time. Also, the cameras seem to
have been hand made one by one, and their parts aren't all that
interchangeable. After playing with a few Kievs, I got my Contax IIa, and
the difference in workmanship was amazing.

As a gemeral rule, the Prewar Contax II and III are better made from better
materials than are the Postwar IIa and IIIa.  Zeiss Ikon before the War was
flush with money and a very skilled workforce, while the Postwar Stuttgart
concern during its 26 years of existence only made a profit in three years,
the last of these being in 1957 when Contaflex III and IV sales gave the
ol' P&L sheet a hefty boost.  And the Postwar company lacked the privileged
position the Prewar company had had for the acquisition of quality
materials -- the Dresden company had really close relations with the German
military and was able to obtain chromes and steels and the like as a
result.  The Postwar company had to buy on the open market and without
money this forced them to replace the brass shutter elements of the Prewar
II and III with much weaker aluminium slats, and so forth.

The IIa and the IIIa are worthy cameras but their planned MTBF was on the
order of 10,000 exposures between CLA's as opposed to the 125,000 to
150,000 on the II and III.  

One final note, this one on lens markings.  Zeiss lenses marked in meters
always have a lower-case "m", while Soviet/Post-Soviet lenses bear a
capital "M".  This is a pretty rigid rule and is one certain way that
collectors sort the wheat from the chaff.

True Zeiss lenses in LTM were diverted from Contax RF BM lenses during
1942, '43, and '44 and were installed on IIIc Leica camersa being sold in
Sweden to pay for high-quality iron ore for use in German U-Boats and tanks
and the like.  All such lenses bear standard Zeiss markings and all are
from Carl Zeiss Jena.  The one known exception to this is a Postwar West
German Zeiss-Opton Sonnar modified at Wetzlar by Leitz technicians for use
by one of the corporate bonzen on his personal camera.

Marc

msmall@aya.yale.edu 
Cha robh b?s fir gun ghr?s fir!

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