Rant: Old timer at a swap meet made me eat my words about CLA

I was at a camera swap in Portland last Saturday and this retired repair guy named Frank tore into me for using compressed air to blow dust off shutter blades before a CLA. He said I was just shoving grit deeper into the oil seals. Told me to use a brush and watch the blades instead. I argued with him for 10 minutes but he pulled out a beat-up Canonet he fixed 20 years ago that still ran smooth without ever seeing canned air. Drove home and tried his method on a junker Pentax K1000. Guess what? No more sticky blades. Anyone else switch to dry cleaning methods after years of being stubborn?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_william1mo ago

Man, I feel this one in my bones. I used to be the guy with the canned air on every sticky shutter, thinking I was a hero. Then I took a junker Minolta SRT to a local repair guy and he literally laughed at me, asked if I was trying to give the camera a terminal illness. Switched to a soft brush and a blower bulb, and my shutters have been happy ever since. I still keep a can of compressed air around for keyboards, though. Cameras, never again.

mila_murphy211mo ago

Wouldn't it make more sense for camera manufacturers to put a warning label on the cans of compressed air, or at least include a note in their manuals about this? I've seen plenty of people damage their cameras this way and it's such a simple fix to prevent. My old Nikon F2 taught me the hard way when a blast of air forced a piece of dust into the mirror box and it took me hours to get it out. These days I just use a soft lens brush and a squeeze bulb for everything including the sensor. The repair guy who fixed my F2 told me he sees this problem at least once a month and it breaks his heart every time.

olivia3981mo ago

Brought up this exact thing with my buddy Mike who went to a workshop last year with a guy that used to repair cameras for National Geographic. He told Mike he never touched compressed air on anything with oil seals, said it was the fast track to ruining a camera. Mike thought he was being old-fashioned until he wrecked a perfectly good Yashica by blasting a speck of dust into the shutter mechanism. Now he just uses a soft brush and a rubber bulb blower and swears his cameras run better than they ever did before.