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Warning: I keep seeing people try to fix sticky shutter blades with canned air
Had a guy bring in a Pentax K1000 last week where the blades were fused together because he blasted them, thinking it would free them up. The propellant just gums everything up worse and can push debris deeper into the mechanism. What's the first thing you reach for when you see a slow shutter, before you even open the camera up?
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the_jenny1mo ago
Honestly, the first thing I do is just work the shutter a bunch on the slowest speed. Sometimes old oil just needs to be moved around and warmed up through use before you even think about taking tools to it. A few dozen fires on 'B' and 1 second can work wonders if it's just starting to get sluggish.
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matthewkim19d ago
Yeah, no kidding. I've been that guy - once blasted a Yashica with compressed air and spent the next hour trying to fish out a tiny piece of dust that got lodged in the curtain track. Now I just grab a lighter and a soft brush, fire off the shutter a bunch of times on bulb to see if the speed is consistent. If it's just sluggish and not stuck, I'll sometimes hit it with a tiny bit of lighter fluid on a q-tip around the actuator arm, let it evaporate, then run it through the speeds. Works more often than you'd think for a quick fix.
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