ZEISS IKON CONTINA IIA – PART 2

Well, there is my second camera which I’ve completely overhauled and I’m very happy with my achievement.

My journey of learning just got to a next level, particularly with the process of reassembly. As I am taking pictures of every single step before and after I remove parts, one should believe that reversing the process will swiftly bring you back to the original state, right? Yeah, not really. Here some of the “pains” I’ve been suffering from today:

  1. Aperture blades: it took 4 attempts to bring it all together, mainly because one blade being particularly stubborn to stay in its position. So try, fail and repeat until success. At one stage, I’ve been forgetting to mount the guide-disk:
Guide-disk for apertue
  1. Putting things together without checking the details: the lever for the flashynchro setting was not completely in place so the whole shutter assembly was slightly misaligned
  2. It took me a lot of trial and error to put back the front plate to the body so it did well align with the rewind mechanism
  3. I yet need to set the focus correctly on the front lens but to do so, I’ll need a ground glass to simulate the film plane. That’ll be another tool on my ever growing list 🙂

All-in-all, I am confident to get better by every camera, even if there will be some drawbacks. My personal tip for all those seeking for an easy way to clean brass and copper is to use a q-tip with some Sigolin Standard or similar and the rub it off with clean q-tip. I’ve used this to clean the copper and messing shims.

Zeiss Ikon Contina IIa – part 1

Today, I’ve been picking up a little Contina IIa with a stuck shutter and film advance. Otherwise, the exterior was in very good condition, no dents, scratches etc.

I’ve decided to have a quick look at what possibly was wrong and once the front-lens assembly including plate has been removed from the body, I could chock and release the shutter. Further down the disassembly, of the shutter and aperture, the latter was completely stuck and all blades oily. The shutter did not look to bad, but again, some lightly oily blades.

Here some pictures of the process until now – next is to clean everything and put all back together.