Have you noticed the recent interest in the Rangefinder film cameras?. If you do a quick search on Google, you will find a lot of references on articles about these old devices. It looks like the film is back on the mood.
I was infected by the rangefinder virus not long ago. My first one was a Chinon 35EE. It came quite cheap from eBay, in good general shape but with degraded seals and a battery stuck inside the battery holder. It took me sometime to figure out hot to replace the seals but cleaning and repairing the battery holder was not difficult, just a matter of hard work. As a result, I was able to shot a roll of film, and I got a handful of nice pictures.
Next came a couple of Canonets, a nice russian FED-2, an Olympus 35RC, some Voigtlander Vitorets, some Konica C35...
My friend Andy was so kind of sending me a Yashica Electro 35 that was not operative. The Yashica is a fine camera but cannot operate without a battery.
The first inspection showed a somewhat corroded spring inside the battery holder. It's quite common on most of the rangefinders I've got so far: the last owner forgets about the battery, the camera remains unused for a long time and the old mercury batteries leak and corrode everything around.
To test it i used an external battery holder (4xAA batteries) that provide 6V (the Yashicas are tolerant to the overvoltage, -at least for a test :wink:-). Two alligator clips, one hooked to the corroded spring and the other one against the top border of the battery holder showed up that I was right. When connected to a clear area in the spring, the camera was powering up.
So the next step was to clean it throughly. I first used white vinegar emmbedding an ear stick and keeping tha camera standing up (working from the downside) to avoid the vinegar flooding inside the cam.
After some cleaning, and after washing it with the same procedure and letting it dry, I put a mill in the hobby drill and touched a little the surface of the spring. Now the contact is much better.
But the problem is to find batteries for this camera. The old PX32A mercury batteries are not longer being manufactured. There are some adapters in the market, but I wanted not to have to wait for weeks in the case I needed a new battery. So I decided to build my own adapter based on local resources.
So I went to the photography store and I asked for a 6V battery, silver-oxide. The guy at the counter brought me a small battery (cylindric hopefully :wink:) that was obviously too small. (I'm not going to go into the battery kinds and woes, it has been told many times before in many places).
The issue was to build some adapter that could use the smaller battery. I needed to fill in the space in between the external cylinder of the battery holder and the battery. Kind of a piece of pipe. It had to be something less than 16mm diameter. So I took the caliper and for some days I went measuring anything that could be considered as a candidate.
(At the end, I was able to tell any cylinder diameter in that range with a precission of 1mm )
Well, one afternoon one specific object draw my attention:
It's true. A marker whose diameter was exactly 15,5mm. The first step was getting rid of the unnecessary parts: Cap, end stopper and trimming the height to a size compatible with the battery holder.
The battery fitted perfectly inside the marker body. The last part was finding a spring to fill in the remaining space until the top that make a good internal contact with the top battery cap. At the local hardware store, again some luck: a spring of 13mm diameter that could do the trick:
