Hit 300 shutter jobs on the bench this winter and finally counted the failures | Camera Repairers - Freelance Forum - The Community for Independent Professionals
Hit 300 shutter jobs on the bench this winter and finally counted the failures
I keep a logbook for every camera that comes through my shop in Worcester. Back in November I flipped to the start and counted, and the number was 300 shutter repairs since the previous winter. What surprised me was that 214 of them were the same two failure points on the same handful of 1970s SLR models. I always figured the mix was wider than that, but the log says otherwise. Anyone else track repairs by hand like this, and did your own numbers surprise you?
There was a thread on a repair forum years back where a guy in Ohio did the same thing with his log and found something like 70 percent of his jobs were one brand. Nobody believed him until he posted scans of the pages. So your 214 out of 300 doesn't shock me at all. When a design is bad in a specific spot, every copy of that camera fails the same way eventually, and there were a million of those things sold. The mix only looks wide until you actually sit down and count. I would be curious what your two failure points are, because I have a guess it is the mirror bumper foam turning to tar and the slow speed escapement gumming up.