Mamiya 7II: Glued Wind Lever Cover Loosening the Screw
Originally posted on Instagram. Notes from the repair bench, kept here as a searchable archive. View the original on Instagram
This Mamiya 7II arrived needing some minor service, mostly a rangefinder calibration. My client mentioned that the rubber cover over the wind lever was loose on one end. On inspection a could see that it was loose and that there was quite a bit of hardened glue underneath the cover.
After removing the cover (shown attached in photo one) I could see that it had been glued down with an excess of adhesive and this was causing a problem (bottom of cover in photo three).
I’ve made two videos showing the wind lever after the rubber cover was removed:
The first video shows me winding the advance lever and if you look carefully at the end of the video where I return the wind lever to the rest position against the body, the center attaching screw (which has been glued to the wind lever!) returns along with the lever. The problem here is that the attaching screw is left hand thread so what is happening is that the screw is being loosened every time the film lever is returned to rest position. Not good and in fact this screw was loose. Eventually the lever would get loose.
The second video shows operation after I have cleaned the wind parts of all the excess glue. At the end of the video you can see how the attaching screw does not move with the lever. A subtle difference but really important because the screw can be tightened and won’t become loose.
My client purchased this camera with the buyer telling him that the camera had a so called “CLA” done. In my opinion, the term CLA is ambiguous and pretty useless. What exactly does it mean? Unless the seller can supply a receipt from a technician showing that the camera was serviced and what was done, I would ignore and discount any comments about a used camera having a CLA. And in this case, if the technician did not know how to handle attaching a rubber cover, why believe that other work would be done to spec?
