Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/06/21

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Subject: Re: [Leica] battery cover - Paging Mr. Tom A.
From: TTAbrahams@aol.com
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1999 22:45:03 EDT

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