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Winfried
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, September 02, 2005 - 05:01 am: | 
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I just received an old Pax rangefinder (first model). The frozen focus got soft after warming it up with a hot air gun after a few minutes. Everything else seems to be repairable.
However, it has a rather crudely made YKK shutter where the speed setting is done by spring tension variation only. Someone seems to have worked on the shutter before and I am everything but sure whether all the springs are bent and placed correctly. Basically the shutter works, with some help I can get it to close and open, but this is far from reliable operation now.
BTW later Pax models seem to have much better shutters. My M4 model has an escapement-controlled shutter which is sufficiently accurate for shooting slides. |
Scott
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, September 03, 2005 - 05:34 am: |
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I've got that same model, and recall that I had to dismantle it almost completely to get the shutter working. However, it's been a couple of years, and now I can't recall very many specific details of the shutter design. I'll see if I can find the notes I made while fixing it.
As for general comments on this camera, I was impressed at the sharpness of the images I got with mine, considering what a simple and basic design it is. Despite the simplicity of its design, they seem to have been built with better quality and with a more robust and functional design than many of the other simple early 1950s Japanese cameras I have fixed and used, and that I assume were in the same general price-range as the PaX line. They must have been quite popular at the time, judging from how many of them are up for sale now. The later models (late 50s?) seem to have been sold under quite a few different brand names.
Let us know what kind of results you get with yours. |
Winfried
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, September 03, 2005 - 10:02 am: |
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I also have a PaxM4 (with a much better escapement controlled shutter, bright frame viewfinder/rangefinder) which gave very acceptable results.
I have fixed and cleaned everything but the shutter now, there was a lot of gummed grease and dirt almost everywhere. But the rangefinder mirror is very contrasty, there have been much worse mirrors in other cameras of that era.
Thanks in advance for looking for your notes about the shutter. |
Scott
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, September 20, 2005 - 03:07 am: |
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Hi again.
Sorry, I couldn't find the notes I made while fixing my PaX, and I'm afraid my mental notes are unreliable at this point. |
Dave B
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, November 06, 2005 - 01:33 pm: |
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This may or may not help
http://photographic.co.nz/cameraworks/cameras/pax/ |
Winfried
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, November 07, 2005 - 12:19 am: |
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Thank you, I already stumbled across this site, but it says very little about the shutter. At least the broken part mentioned on this site is OK on mine.
The problem is that on my item it seems as someone has worked on the shutter before. Since this is a very simple shutter where speed variations depend on spring tension I think I have to get the arrangement of two or three hairsprings correctly which probably is not easy to figure out from scratch. |
