Repairs page 1

ABOUT a year ago a friend moved into an old Victorian house not far from me and started clearing out the garage and garden sheds of rubbish that previous owners had kindly left. He came round one Saturday and said: "You like tinkering with old cameras. See if you can do anything with this. Good luck!"
'This' was a Voigtländer folder from the 1930s, and it was, without doubt, in a worse condition than any camera I'd ever had, or even seen. It had been left open in a box in a dampish shed for years, and most of the leather covering was missing.

Without doubt this poor, sad old Voigtländer was in worse condition than any camera I'd ever had.

The body was covered in rust, including the once bright edges that would now have to be painted. The lens standard was firmly stuck to the rails with corrosion, the aluminium baseboard was growing white crystals, the Skopar lens was filthy inside and out and what was left of the bellows was in tatters. The nickel plating was a dull dirty grey. Remarkably the Compur shutter functioned, or at least made a brave attempt, on all its speeds. I thought about taking out the lens and shutter and throwing the rest away, but as it was given to me as a challenge, and it wasn't physically damaged, I had to try to restore it.
Obviously it would all have to come apart but when I tried a couple of screws they didn't want to budge. Normally I won't bring WD40 anywhere near a camera but in this case a good soak in it seemed the only thing to do. However, I didn't want to get WD40 inside the shutter because it leaves a sticky residue, so I took that off first. There was a slight snag here as the screwed ring that holds the lens and shutter to the lens panel just wouldn't undo. I didn't want to exert too much force in case I damaged the shutter housing so after cutting round the front tatters of the bellows to give me more room I took out the lens elements which fortunately came out quite easily, stuffed soft toilet paper in the back of the shutter to keep out swarf and sawed the ring off with a fine hacksaw. These rings are in standard sizes for the range of shutters made be Deckel, and after rooting around in one of my boxes of old bits I keep in case they come in handy I found one the right size on the back of a broken and partly dismantled Compur.
Another slight snag was that the front wire frame finder was bent and had been bent too many times. It snapped off near the top eyelet, so I made a note to get some brass wire to make a new one, and put the shutter and lens panel safely away. A 24 hours soak in WD40 did its job, and I got all the screwed-on pieces off the body without one screw breaking. The red window and its surround came out after I bent up a couple of folded metal tags inside, and the exposure guide plate on the back lifted off after I drilled out the insides of the rivets. These pieces, together with the focusing lever and rack, the back part of the frame finder and other odd bits, together with their associated screws, were put away in separate plastic bags while I tacked the rust.

A finger-aching but essential job, getting
rid of all the rust.

This was the longest job but not particularly difficult, just time consuming and finger aching. I thought about visiting another friend who has a small bead blaster, but some of the metal body was very thin gauge and I feared the blasting might distort it so I decided on the old fashioned way. I did a certain amount with my Dremel tool set on its slowest speed, first with a wire brush and then with an abrasive flap wheel, but in the end it came down to a lot of rubbing with medium and then fine aluminium oxide rubing down

The film plane edges were rubbed down and burnished to avoid scratches on the film.

paper. When only the black colour of the rust was left in the pitmarks I treated that with a rust killer and sanded it down again. The edges of the film plane aperture were quite rough with corrosion so I spent quite a lot of time with successively finer grades of running paper and then burnished them. After that I washed the whole thing in methylated spirit (denatured alcohol) and blew it dry with compressed air.
After that came a lot of fiddly masking off because unlike a lot of 35mm cameras where everything unscrews, many of the parts, including the plated struts, on old folders are riveted in place. The parts I wanted to paint were first wiped over with isopropyl alcohol to get rid of any finger marks and sprayed first with primer on the outside, then with mat black inside and out, and finally with gloss black on the inside of the folding baseplate and the outside edges. I used a gloss black instead of my usual satin black because an early Bessa I've got is finished in gloss so I assumed most pre-war Voigtländer folders were.
I usually use an airbrush and model auto enamel for painting cameras but my airbrush was out of commission at the time with a bent needle (careless cleaning!) and the needles I ordered were 'on hold waiting for them to come in', so I decided to try an aerosol. I debated for a time what brand paint to use, and in the end settled on Plasti- Kote after reading various recommendations on the internet from people who used it to spray radio controlled model cars. I found the aerosol was far

After cleaning and painting the body started to look as if someone owned it.

more tricky to use than my airbrush because the flow out of the nozzle was about ten times as fast. I experimented on a few scrap pieces of metal and found that I had to hold the nozzle about a foot to eighteen inches away and spray very light mist coats keping the can moving to avoid too

I had to cut the ring holding the back of the shutter. The frame finder had been bent once too often.

much paint in one place and runs. I'm quite pleased with the job but I'm glad my airbrush is now back up and working.
     The camera was now starting to look as if somebody owned it, but the thing that held me up for several weeks was the bellows. I salvaged enough of the old bellows to use as a pattern and made a couple of sets in thin card. The second set fitted OK so I made a 'user' set with blackout material for the lining and the thinnest vinyl I could get for the outside. I thought I'd better try a dummy fitting run before I glued them, and it's a good job I did because when they were folded the bulk was just too thick to let the lens panel and shutter go back far enough into the body to close the door. Oops!
     I decided to get on with the rest of the bits and pieces while I looked for a thinner light-tight lining material as nearly all bellows depend on the lining, not the outer covering, for being light tight. Then I had a stroke of pure luck. I was poking around in a box under a table at a car boot sale and came across an old Kodak Junior 9x6 folder with a meniscus lens in a single speed shuter that didn't work, and a grey plastic top plate that was broken. But the belllows looked sound enough, so I risked the enormous sum of 20p on it.
     Getting the bellows off without damaging them was quite a struggle. No screwed ring to hold the back of the shutter on this baby. The plate inside the bellows was riveted to the lens panel. After I drilled out the rivets the front of the

The exposure guide was cleaned and painted black, and then the numbers scraped clean with the edge of a piece of plastic.

bellows came away OK, but the back was a shade more awkward. As usual, Kodak used a thin metal frame inside the bellows at the back but instead of the usual clips to hold it the film plane had extended metal plates at each short end which were swaged over the last fold of the bellows. No way would it lift up without sacrificing either the bellows or the body. You can guess which route I chose. Ten minutes with a hacksaw reduced the Kodak's body to the point where I could prise up the swaged metal parts, and the glue yielded to Ronsonol applied with a small brush. I tried the bellows in the Voigtländer. Oh joy! A perfect fit. All I had to do was shave about half a millimetre all round off the Voigtländer's plate that fitted inside the back folds.
While I was waiting to sort out the bellows material I'd been getting on with the other jobs. The Compur was stripped and cleaned and now clicked and buzzed happily on all speeds, the lens elements cleaned well with no trace of separation or fungus. When I came to the wire frame finder the screw in the eyelet part just wouldn't shift, so instead of making a new one I resorted to an old

The finished Voigtländer in all its glory

dodge and joined the broken ends with a short piece of thin wall brass tubing. Other jobs were freeing and cleaning the focusing lever and its charriot, cleaning and reblacking the exposure guide plate ready to go on the back of the camera, opening and cleaning the small reflecting viewfinder and recovering the body. I looked around for some leatherette with a suitable grain and found some on the cover of an old water-damaged Victorian encyclopedia, one of what had once been a set of twelve. It was dark blue and water marked, but it cleaned and dyed black very well. To fit the more tricky bits I made templates by sticking some masking tape on the body, trimming the edges to size with a craft knife and them peeling it off and sticking it on the leatherette before cutting out.
I riveted the expusure guide plate with small aluminium rivets with a smear of mastic to keep the holes light tight, fitted the bellows and shutter and put all the rest of the bits back together. Now all that was left was to set the lens at infinity beforte coup[ling the focusing lever and I was ready to try a film. I loaded it with 100 ASA Fujicolor and took it out for eight quick test shots. I was pleased with the results. The pictures were clear and sharp, and the uncoated Skopar, like most good quality uncoated lenses, coped with modern colour film very well provided I used a lens hood and was careful about flare.
So was it all worth it? Well, I was given the camera and spent in all about £2.50 on materials so from that point of view yes it was. I didn't keep tally of the hours it took to do but if I had, and compared the time with the present value of the camera I probably worked for pennies or fractions of a penny an hour. But them who counts time spent on a hobby? And I got a lot of interest and satisfaction in rescuing the old warrior.

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