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Nikon FE2, FM2, FA: Shutter Service

Transcript

Hello everybody this is Jim once again, from International Camera Technicians.

Review where we are so far:

This is my little FE2. We pulled the front out, we pulled the top. There should be separate videos on them; watch them before you get to this point. You don’t have to unsolder every wire in the world on this FE2; a lot of them still stay connected. You can pull the front out, so here we are.

What we’re going to do next:

What we’re going do is we’re going pull the shutter out, we’re going clean the shutter, and replace that really disgusting seal on the top. (Did I throw out the rest of it? Yeah, threw it away.) And then we’re going put it back together and clean the magnet, and make sure everything works, so let’s get going!

Remove the back:

So these you have a brass screw over here and then you have a big conical screw. I don’t know why they did that, but you can pretty much see that. There’s probably a reason and I don’t know why.

Go ahead and pop back, pull it back open, one screw right here at the base, it’s a long screw and it can be tight. Pull that one out.

Remove the shutter:

Let’s pull the shutter back. Sometimes there, it is stuck with glue so you got to get in there and break the glue. There’s a little felt piece on this side for a light trap and just slowly work your way up, there you go, work it on up now. so I’ll end up cleaning all this stuff, and get it ready for a new seal.

Take this out of the way, we got our shutter, so just throw this junk away. What it does is it junk all over my fingers too. Ick.

Clean the shutter:

Alright, so just real quickly, I’m just going to go ahead and get any of this off. It’s about as much as there normally is, you just do it this way instead. Ok get some acetone in there and then you can handle the shutter without getting too much of this stuff all over your fingers.

Preparing to access the blades:

Go ahead and pull each blade out clean the blades put it back together. Alright, so we have this nice clean tissue. I do that because I’m trying not to get this all incredibly dirty, but it’s sometimes very difficult. Take this apart, we got two screws, one here and one there. Note the one on top does have the circuit board attached.

This comes up — it’s slotted — lift up, push it forward. Now things like to be stuck together on these; there’s big blob of glue right there, so we’ll probably get some of that, clean that off. Once again slotted; this one’s already popped at the top.

Remove the shutter plate:

Okay, here’s where it gets tricky, especially if you’ve taken it apart with the shutter charged. Okay so this one isn’t. That plate comes off. There’s a helper spring right here. This guy’s just lying in there, so if this blade was down in the charged position right here, yeah won’t come down yet. If this [spring] was down, this spring would be under a lot of tension as soon as you take this plate off. That spring will go flying on you, so try to do it in what I believe is a release position. Yep release position. So try to take that apart this part in the release position.

There’s the bumper up here in the top; take that out. Okay let’s take the spring out before I catch it on something that goes flying.

Take this little plate off here. It goes on two ways, that way or this way, and it’s the matte side that goes down. Not such a big deal on these cameras, on this particular shutter. The blade is out and looks in good shape.

I see the spacer at the bottom. Take spacer out. Notice no spacer on the top. Spacer only on the bottom, it’s a fairly thin spacer too.

Alright, next plate and if it gets caught up here, there’s a little bumper up here as well. Take this guy out. This one has two. I’m not sure what the deal with two of them are but all have two. So this one would come off and then that one. I always know that guy goes down first, so it doesn’t really matter to me.

Alright notice spring here to here is under tension. Notice, spacer on the top. Now while this spacer is here and there’s no spacer down here, is that when this is in charged position or in this position when this blade’s up, all these layer blades and you see them, there’s a bunch of layers, they’re all stacked blades. They are stacked on top of one another, this spacer is specifically designed to give them space. It makes sense right? So it doesn’t pinch them up at the top here and allow the blade to move slowly so that spacer is very critical here. And then on the second blade it’ll go down the bottom.

Alright so what I intend to do on these, since I know that’s under tension, pop it up, then out, and just rotate it this direction here until you unhook the spring.

Remove the helper spring:

This spring goes inside. Now the bottom one, when you put it on and I took it off but I’ll show it when it goes on, it is so tempting to try and put it through that little hole there the helper spring. No, it does not work. Let’s go ahead and get this helper spring out of the way.

You can’t get them confused. One’s got two hooks on it, look this one’s only got one hook, and then just a straight.

Cleaning the blades:

Alright so pretty much this was a beautiful looking shutter. Didn’t look like it had any dirt on it, looked like it was all ready to go. Most people would have just let this go, but I’ll start to clean it, that is something that wasn’t ready to go. A lot of it is oxidized, oxidized paint. There’s a lot of grease down here though. Grease on these pivots slow the blades down, make them erratic, do all kinds of stuff, so I like to clean this area very, very thoroughly.

Okay so for me that’s clean. Let’s set it aside.

Put the top blade back in:

Now this is my top blade, which will go in first so when I clean this I don’t see a ton of grease all over the blade. I’m not worried too much about that but I’m looking at the pivot points, so I’ll go over the pivot points [to clean them]. Flip it over, get the pivot points.

Now if you really look at the Q,-tip, there’s quite a bit of stuff on it already. So even though they look like they’re beautiful ready to go, nope.

Put the spring back in:

What we’re go ahead and do is since I got that one cleaned, take my spring, put my spring back in upper post. Put this guy in [shutter blade]. It’s going go through that small hole, bring it out here until I see it drop in, rotate it in, drop both in the right position.

Put in left side blade:

And it helps if I had this guy in first too. It’s no big deal, push it under, don’t do it this way. If you put it in first it’s so much easier, so I just want to make sure they got it on the right side. Yep.

Okay so yeah put it in backwards, should have that plate in first then the blade.

Clean, inspect, and reassemble remaining blades:

Alright so put that aside for now and put my spacer on the top so I remember it’s there, go ahead get the pivots on this one. I used acetone [to clean] the first one; I’m using denatured alcohol on the second one. I don’t think acetone was really needed and if I get too much acetone on this mat, it’ll just melt this mat. So I swapped over to alcohol. This is denatured alcohol, not drinkable. I need to get more.

That guy will be ready to go in. I always inspect these plates, let’s see if there’s any crud on them, grease. There’s just a touch right over here and that one I’m going to get some acetone for down by the pivots. Oh, there’s some pivots,  go ahead the first one on.

On the second one I’m looking for the same stuff — anything that looks like it’s out of place, shouldn’t be there. There’s a little bit of stuff [dirt] up here, but generally it’s a pretty clean shutter.

This is the worst spot is usually, where you see most of the junk come off. Get the blades out of the way and get where they pivot. All right, we got that in there.

Reassemble the remaining blades:

Let’s go ahead and get our next blade in. This one fans out . It comes across, drop there [bottom screw], right in drop there [top screw]. Put back the spacer on the bottom. Okay this one was pretty clean too.

Don’t forget the two things —the bumper — which is here, this side has a groove in it. It’s where the blade’s been hitting it. Sometimes they wear a groove in there, so I like to come where it’s going to get hit. Now there’s no groove so it’s for the shutter it’s a new side. Put that in there.

Add the additional blades:

Put the post into the hole, then slide it along where the groove is, and when everything (the screw holes) align, make sure your upper spring is still in there, especially that upper is still latched and nothing fell out. I’m looking for this bumper [taps top left], it likes to fall out on you. Next one [shutter blade] goes in.

Screws go back in:

Okay at this point you put one of the screws in. I’m going go ahead and do my last screw here [to attach the circuit board]. Nice. And one thing I like to do is, I like to get this plastic back off [the circuit board] here, mainly because when I melt it, I don’t like smelling plastic.

And then when I put some solder flux on here these will go back looking nice instead of looking like someone just chucked them together using old solder.

Clean the magnet and armature:

Alright, so I want to get the magnet now. The magnet is stuck down inside there. I don’t know if you can see it. Hoping you can see it all right, and the armature is here. I hope you can see that.

So to do that I just want to go ahead and unhook this spring on the top here — this is your self-timer spring — and then unhook it on the bottom. The bottom hooks right under here. See where I hook that underneath. Okay the spring is going to go in this direction. With that hook down. That goes in like that. Okay, like that.

Alright, common problem with FE2s, dirty magnets. Also with the FE. FE has the same issues. They get dirty, you get erratic speeds. Sometimes the mirror will go up because the shutter just release and it didn’t run a speed. So these need to be cleaned. Break off a small piece of Q-tip, usually roll it up, fairly tight, squeeze it in there so you get some sticking out [from the tweezers] this side and on this side. I put it in acetone and clean all the junk off it. You only want to touch the top of the magnet. You don’t want to get the base where the plastic is.

Okay, do that. Then across here, needs to be fully perfectly clean. So that’s what you do on that. Take another piece [of the Q-tip] here. To finish it up, I’m actually going use a little alcohol on this guy here.

Okay, that [magnet] is nice and clean and shiny. I know that has some junk on this thing. This looks dirtier than it was.

Test the shutter:

Okay, let me put the spring back on and basically we’ll test this shutter. It should be just fine but I still haven’t charged it. I need a word of caution on charging a shutter that’s out. Okay so there’s your charging lever. Right here for the shutter charge, it releases. That one up there.

So what you want to do, you want to be careful. If I held that it just was out of the way so these are your mechanical speeds with this lever here, so this was like running a mechanical speed. It would just release. You see the lever right here coming up, that’s actually blocking the armature against the magnet. I mean electronically there’s no electronic go to at all obviously, but these levers are blocking the pallet coming out and releasing the second curtain, so once that goes over, it lifts them up. Boom. Shutter releases. So when this is out and we have a regular shutter and that’s out. Magnets holding it. As soon as I release, the magnet releases. So the shutter is in good shape.

Now, some of these shutters, you can over charge the shutter when it’s out and that is just like charging it, and just keep going and going and going. This lever here can over spin. If it does, and the latch will fall in an incorrect position and it will jam up on you. Yeah, it’ll be a pain in the butt, so don’t over charge the shutter while it’s out.

Thank you; I’d appreciate if you’d subscribe. Thank you for watching and look forward to making my next video. Take care; bye!

Put the shutter back in the camera:

So I’m just going to go down, pull this chunk out. Alrighty. So what we do, drop the shutter in, you know wiggle it a little bit let it drop into place. Voila!

It should go in and should be tight, but you should have a wobble in it. Press in the screw at the top corner, then go on [to the screw] right above the shutter mechanism. Tighten. It should be tightened, but not too much.

And [now for] the last screw — open the back door. Put it in here, tighten that up, alright. Shift back in, pull that out of the way. Charge the shutter. Release shutter. So that’s the lever down there that I’m moving aside and making charge and charge it all day long. Boom.

Alright, and once the mirror charges, it allows it to lock in. Alright that’s it. I’ll go ahead and put the wire back in. Put the new seal in, which I don’t have handy right now. You don’t need to see me cut a seal for it, I’ll cut that probably about a two millimeter seal, put it about the same width from this edge to about that edge right there, then run it all the way back to here. It should stop light from going down there because your eyepiece is right here. Light comes in your eyepiece and you don’t want it going down in the shutter and getting a light leak.

Put springs back in:

Let’s get my helper spring. Instead the helper spring to help your spring on do not try to get it in that second hole — the top one, yes — the bottom one, no. I doesn’t even reach . That [the spring] just pulls around. That’s exactly how things should look.