10 years of fixing shutters and I just learned the aperture ring trick
I've been repairing cameras since 2014, mostly old SLRs and rangefinders. Every time a shutter was sticky or blades were off, I'd tear the whole lens apart, clean everything, lube what I could, and pray it worked. Last Tuesday a customer brings in a Yashica with a stuck aperture and says, "My uncle always said to fire the shutter at every aperture before you open anything." So I try it, just cycling the ring a few times at each stop. The blades freed up in about 4 minutes. No disassembly, no cleaning. I felt like an idiot standing there. How many lenses did I destroy or waste hours on because I never tried the simplest thing? Has anyone else had a basic step like that blow their mind way later than it should have?