A 90-Year-Old Argus A and a Shutter That Wouldn't Come Home
I recently picked up an Argus A. I became interested in this camera after learning that it was one of the first cameras to popularize 35mm film, and a similar-looking camera had caught my eye in an Indiana Jones video game. These cameras are still easy to find, and the idea of taking pictures with a 90-year-old camera was hard to resist. I was looking forward to running a roll of film through it, and hoping it worked.
When it arrived, though, the shutter was not functioning correctly.
Taking the lens apart
I took the lens apart and cleaned it. That part went well, and it narrowed the problem down: the shutter blades themselves moved fine, but the parts that activate the shutter were not moving correctly. The shutter was not returning to its closed position.
The culprit, as far as I could tell, was the spring. It was too loose to pull the shutter back home.
Making a new spring
The fix turned into a small project of its own. I found that the exact same kind of sprung stainless steel wire was available, in the same .007-inch size, so I set out to make a new torsion spring from it.
That meant bending the new wire around a toothpick to form the spring. This was no easy task, and it took several tries to get it to function at all. A spring this small does not forgive a bend that is slightly off, and each attempt taught me a little more about how much tension it needed and where the coils had to sit.
Where it stands now
The new spring is an improvement. It is now allowing a couple of shutter speeds to work, but it is not functioning at all of its speeds yet.
So this one is not finished. More trial and error is needed — more adjustments to the spring, more testing of the speeds, and then, hopefully, a roll of film through a camera that is nearly a century old.
That will be the real test, and the next part of this story.