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Hey, the F works!

A guy at Action Camera took a look at it and with some minor additional cleaning and a fresh set of batteries the motor spun for the most part fine. “It just needs to work out some.”

So work it out I did. I shot some from the bluffs above the Old Fair Oaks bridge and I discovered what I think is an F-ism:

As you depress the shutter release (the main one, not the motor-drive ones) the mirror pops up, then the shutter fires. If you depress the shutter release button slowly, as you would pull the trigger on a rifle, you reach the point where you lift the mirror but haven’t yet fired the shutter. Then as you keep pressing the shutter fires and the mirror drops.

It’s a disjointing feeling as I wasn’t all together expecting it and I wasn’t sure it was only the mirror being slow and not the shutter. I shot a lot of frames twice.

Shooting without a meter is fun by the way, f/8 and be there. I found that I can make use of the spot meter in my D80 and then… um bracket. Seems to work pretty well :).

Every now and then the motor misses a beat or just locks up. Keeping it in single mode side steps this for the most part.

Addendum: a co-worker who owns several F’s pointed out, “you’re not shooting in “H” (high-speed) mode are you? You’re supposed to have the mirror locked up in that mode.” Oh, oops. Motor works fine now.

Twenty years ago I walked onto my Community College newspaper and said, “I want to be a photographer.”

Thus started a long and sordid affair with photography and newspapers in general, although these days I try pretty hard to hide it :). It’s been 10 years since I ran a roll of film (what’s film grandpa?) through a camera.

Slowly the photo itch has been returning, tho I blame some people for subtly helping it along.

I’d been eyeballing the Nikon D80 and with the unexpected arrival of the Nikon F, it’s been downright impossible to ignore so today, under the auspices of looking for an old NIKKOR-S 50mm to match the F, I headed to Action Camera in Roseville and while they didn’t have any NIKKOR-S’s they did have a D80 :).

So now I’m hooked. I dug out what remains of my old gear, including my prised AI Nikkor 180mm f/2.8 ED and my old F3HP, and blew the dust off of them as well.

I guess we’ll see where this goes, no?

Here it is!

As you can see it’s a little more worn than the stock image I posted below :).

It’s been a few days of scraping off battery leakage out of the battery pack and I think I’ve gotten the battery compartment as clean as I’m gonna get it, though it’s a ways away from perfect (this must be what my dentist feels like).

I finally got impatient and popped in 8 AA batteries and hooked it up.

clickety-clickety-clickety-cuhlickety-cuuuhlick…ety-cuh…..lick….et… Aw crap!

It worked, for a bit, and then kinda slowed down and stopped. It seemed like it didn’t have the juice, or at least that’s what I’m telling myself, since the obvious explanation for that is better than “the motor is hosed.”

The one contact spring that was caked in potassium hydro-leaky-whatever goo was pretty corroded (aka rusted). I hit it with a trusty eraser, but it really didn’t clean up well. My fear (or rather my hope) is that that rusted contact just isn’t letting through enough juice to reliably power the motor.

That said, I picked up a roll of 35mm film (Kodak BW400CN) so motor or no, look for some images soon.

I took the F to the venerable California Precision Service in Sacramento where I used to get all my repairs done 20 years ago.

They were duly impressed at the F but told me there’s no parts available so I was on my own as far as repairs.

I did have them test the shutter and as it turned out the 40+ year old mechanism was as accurate as ever. Simply amazing.

So it was time to focus on those pesky batteries…

I’d tried a few things so far, a paperclip hook for instance, but the batteries were stuck tight. I even tried to remove the housing bottom but for some reason it wouldn’t come off. Finally I turned to Mr. DeWalt and his little buddy Bit.

I drilled into the batteries and used a pair of long nose pliers to yank them out. It was surprisingly tough, but it worked.

Alkaline batteries (Kodak brand). This explained the hefty deposits of potassium hydroxide caked around the inside of the battery compartment. This presented a whole new problem as the buildup was pretty substantial at the bottom of one of the battery tubes.

One thing at a time though.

Ok, I started cleaning up the F a bit. I suppose I could have found any number of places on the ‘Net with info and docs on how the F models work, but because I’d used Nikons professionally myself a number of years ago (an FM2 and an F3) I opted to rely on my long suppressed “Nikon Zen” to figure out what all the buttons and levers do.

More fun that way.

It took me a bit but through process of elimination I figured it all out. I was most surprised when I turned the key on the bottom and the body split in two. See, back then they didn’t have newfangled hinged doors over the film, you took the damn body apart to get at the film… and you liked it!

Oh and there was film in it (it’s not the shutter speed that got you… it’s the aperture). Price Club brand to boot ;).

I removed the old rotting shoulder strap. I was unsure if I wanted to keep the little triangle rings that attached to the camera… then I cut my thumb on one and that settled it, they went with the strap and the film.

The bottom right of the body had some nasty fungus gunk on it. Think about it, that’s the part firmly planted in your sweaty palm. The more I thought about it the more grossed out I got, so I broke out the bleach.

Lets go back a moment to “I cut my thumb” above… Yeah, I’ll want to be getting gloves next time.

The fungus goo came off with some work, but the really neat effect was to hit the once white (now kinda brownish-white) lettering and make it bright white again.

So the shutter seems to fire at all speeds, tho I don’t know how accurately (gotta love mechanical shutters) and there’s still the issue of the three stuck batteries.

A co-worker dropped a gift on my desk today: a black Nikon “F” with motordrive.

Whoa.

It apparently sat on a shelf in his house for a number of years gathering dust (quite literally as I can attest to). Prior to that it was owned by a professional news photographer and it shows some substantial wear and tear. The serial number is quite early (6482469) so seems to indicates that this camera is most likely older than I am.

The one down side is that 3 batteries have leaked in the motordrive’s battery pack and are pretty much corroded in place. He had tried WD-40 to get them out (yikes).

So this thing is very dirty, very banged up, smells a bit funny… and is simply the coolest gift ever.