Dropped a Rolleiflex at a flea market in Portland and it taught me to check every screw first.

Was just walking around with it around my neck and the lens board just fell off mid-step because the previous owner had stripped all the little brass screws and I didn't catch it, anyone else had a camera fall apart on them from a bad previous repair?

3 comments

3 Comments

jason_fisher41mo ago

Ask @brooke533 if they ever found a decent source for replacement screws that actually match the original thread pitch. I had a similar thing with an old Agfa folder where someone had jammed a standard UNC screw into a fine thread hole and it was held in by nothing but brass shavings and hope. The real kicker was when I tried to take it out and it snapped clean off flush with the body plate. Had to drill out the whole thing and tap it to a modern size just to get the back to close again.

barnes.morgan10d ago

Wait, did @jason_fisher4 ever find a halfway decent source for those fine pitch screws that aren't just a crapshoot from some random eBay lot? Because that Agfa situation sounds EXACTLY like what I ran into with a Kodak Retina IIIC last month where someone had forced a slightly larger screw into a stripped hole and it was held in by absolutely nothing but hope and old brass dust. The real problem is these old cameras used thread pitches that basically don't exist in any modern catalog, and most of the "repair kits" you see online are just filled with standard hardware store junk that will strip your threads within a year. I ended up buying a whole box of vintage screws from a guy who parted out dead Rolleiflexes, but even then half of them had the wrong head shape. It makes me wonder if there's actually any trustworthy place that sells proper metric fine thread screws in the right sizes, or if we're all just doomed to cannibalize broken cameras forever.

brooke5331mo ago

The thing that gets me is how many people don't realize those old Rolleiflex screws are often a weird metric/imperial hybrid from the 1950s. I had a similar thing happen with a Mamiya C220 where the previous owner used random hardware store screws that were just slightly too long and they cracked the internal focusing helix. 4 out of 6 screws were original and the other 2 were holding things together by pure luck. A lot of these repair jobs from back in the day were done by guys who just grabbed whatever was in their jar and called it good. Always worth pulling a screw or two and checking the thread pitch with a cheap gauge before you trust it.