I just need to ventilate. I have been working on making one good Rollei out of two junkers. Very frustrating because both have serious problems. Both are early post-war Automats. One had a badly scratched up front lens element, the other had a good front element but a fungus damaged center element. I found that I could use the good front element in the scratched lens with a slight change in focal length. The finder lens from the camera that element came from matches the resulting lens exactly. Good luck so far. I chose to use the body that seemed to be in the best condition. After finishing it I tested the wind mechanism; no good, jams on every alternative frame. That's beyond my skill to fix (though I may disassemble it further to see what's there). So, I moved to the other body which has a properly working wind mechanism. Turns out the mounting for the lens board is not parallel to the body. I am not sure how that's fixed either other than the guides are probably adjustable after stripping absolutely all of the mechanism out of the body. Shimming will not fix this because the focus movement is not parallel with the body. One camera had a damaged focus hood so I have a good one. One camera had a modfied shutter for a flash synchronizer with modified front panel to mount the solenoid. The other is original and I used that one. What I have now is a working camera with a decent lens (seems to be sharp as far as I can tell using a ground glass and also looking at the aerial image) but tilted focus mechanism. I may just leave it like that unless I find the parallelism adjustment is simpler to get to than I think it is. OTOH, I may be able to repair the wind mechanism on the camera body that runs straight since I have enough parts. I do this for fun! Neither of these cameras is worh what Harry Fleenor (or any other competent repair person) would have to charge to make them right but I sure appreciate what he does. Hi Harry, you must keep a good supply of aspirin.
-- Richard Knoppow Los Angeles, CA, USAdickburk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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