Overheard a guy at the camera shop say something that made me rethink my CLA process

I was at Keh's drop-off counter last Tuesday and this older repair guy was talking to the clerk about how he never fully disassembles old Pentax spotmatics anymore. He said something like 'if the shutter speeds are close, leave the gear train alone, you're just asking for alignment headaches.' That stuck with me because I've been wasting hours pulling apart perfectly good cameras just to be thorough. I had a Minolta SRT-101 on my bench that weekend with a sticky slow speed and I just cleaned the escapement in place with some Ronsonol instead of stripping the whole bottom plate. It worked fine and saved me about 45 minutes. Has anyone else found that their over-repairing actually causes more issues than it fixes?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_sarah20d ago

Devil's advocate here. That "close enough" mindset is how you end up with a camera that's "good enough" today but totally off in a year when things settle. The guy at the shop is taking shortcuts because he's jaded by volume work, not because it's the right way to do things. I've had plenty of "quick fix" jobs come back worse than before because you can't truly clean an escapement without getting into the whole gear train. Ronsonol evaporates but it leaves residue behind, and without pulling the plates you're just pushing gunk around. The issue with spotmatics especially is that their shutter timing changes as the lubricants age differently in different spots. A partial clean treats the symptoms but not the disease. You're trading 45 minutes now for a guaranteed return visit later. I'll take alignment headaches over mystery failures any day. At least when I do a full tear down I know exactly what's in there.

sageburns20d ago

You got me @the_sarah. I used to skip the full tear down but you're right.