It seems I may have bought a beautiful Minolta Himatic F bookend on EBay.
After receiving an apparently mint camera, I inserted two known to be good 640 cells and had no power to the camera. Shutter seems to "fire", but it sounds as though it is on "B" with no aperature/shutter blade movement. This is the case even without batteries installed. Battery check button does not light the lamp either.
Is it worth exploratory surgery and/or is an electronic issue that can be fixed generally?
It is a typical defect. Probably the solder junction of the battery chamber's minus pole has been etched away by the acid of a leaking battery. You have to re-solder it. Mostly this is more difficult as is sounds. Clean the solder points very carefully. It might be advised to cut back a part of the wire and to replace it because the acid usually creeped up into the wire. In bad cases the whole negative wire has to be replaced.
On the Hi-Matic F the battery wire in question is rather short and usually cannot be cut to get an uncorroded part of the wire. The wire goes up to the shutter release button area, and if you have to replace it completely you will have to disassemble the front part of the camera.
Up to now I have not seen any Hi-Matic F without corroded wires.
