Old cameras are a fantastic way to experiment with photography, and outside a few brands, they can be an inexpensive way too. It’s easy to find older cameras in a broken condition for a lot less money, but if you’re tempted to fix one then [enthdegree] has some advice for you.
It’s ostensibly a set of notes on the disassembly and repair of a Nikon F100 35mm film SLR, but along the way it’s full of useful tips and tricks for camera disassembly. he materials you’ll need, advice on not losing screws is one, and warnings against disassembling too much is another. It’s all the stuff he wished he’d known before starting, and now you can know it too.
Fixing up old cameras in this way is rewarding, and something we’ve certainly been known to do ourselves. But it’s worth bearing in mind that it’s not for the faint-hearted, and with decades of old film cameras sitting unused, often a working example might make more sense.
There’s a scene in one of the Laura Croft movies where the assistant is disassembling a clock, video taping himself and placing screws onto a labelled grid while narrating what he’s doing “removing second screw from first inner assembly and placing it in grid 5A” and so on.
That’s basically what you need for camera or watch disassembly (and large format printers). Keep a complete record of what you’re doing, because beyond the casing you will never remember how it came apart.
Different screws attaching the same piece can have different sizes, removal/replacement order might be important, and of course which assembly comes before another is also important.
(Of interest, pick up several of those plastic pill caddys at the dollar store, the ones with small plastic bins labelled M/T/W/T/F, label each separately (A, B, C…), and use these in labelled order to hold screws. A board with 5 caddys glued to it makes a good screw sorting system.)