Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2007/10/20
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]That camera likely sat and collected dust and dried out for years somewhere before the person decided to sell it. When you bring it in for a CLA it should work better than ever and not too that. Sometimes people will take the lens off before they wind the film and you get a lock up. You need a screw driver or you can get a special Hassy tool to reach in and turn the thing which re cocks the shutter. I never botched a job because of a Hasselblad screw up and shot hundreds of them with them. My ELM which I got in '79 and you can get now for a couple of hundred bucks always rewind to the next frame automatically. So when I got my 503 CM in '92 I'd forget to cock the shutter sometimes when I'd take the lens off. Take two minutes to fix. Once this happened during a critical event I was shooting and I used the ELM till I had a lull to get the CM unjammed. The biggest enemy of a camera is sitting. Not over using. And the backs need to be CLA'd every once in awhile you can get foam and learn to do it yourself. But if you have a lot of backs its some real money - maintenance. Usually when something goes wrong its a back. An old back has bound to have sat. I'd bring it into get CLA'd before I'd use it. But nowadays the CLA will cost you more than the back. As they sell for so cheap. I'm about to start using mine again perhaps for photojournalism work. All I have in NY with me is a 60mm Distagon and a 100 3.5 Planar. I got in the past few year s a cheap fun superslide and 645 blacks for less than a hundred bucks. And old made in Germany compact 60's vintage pre Polaroid back prisms. 90 and 45 degree. I'd check those out. But nothing beats the folding finder. You need to have the Acumat screen. Or you can't see for beans through the darned thing. Or a Marflex screen. Those might be better. I also got bellows. Hassy stuff is so cheap its like its free. Some thing its all about the Zeiss glass. I started out with a 220 back. 24 frames and be there. Mark William Rabiner markrabiner.com