For a while now I've had the idea of buying a medium format film camera to play about with, and one of the models I've had my eye on is the Pentacon Six SLR.
The problem is they are quite expensive to buy, and have a reputation for being unreliable, and I don't want to spend close to £100 for a camera only to find it stops working a couple of weeks after I get it. They also however have a reputation of being able to produce some quite stunning results when they are working correctly.
Then it occurred to me that it might be quite interesting to buy a faulty unit and treat it as a project to get it working again. So, welcome to my 'Pentacon Six Project'.
I did an eBay search and found this unit which was described as having a sticky shutter. In fact the description was 'semi working, shutter sticks regularly but probably easily repaired for someone keen to pick one up cheap'.
That sounded like exactly the sort of thing I was looking for, so I added it to my watch list and kept an eye on the price. It started at £0.99 and by the time it got to the last hour or so it was still only about £12, so I waited until the last minute (well the last 5 seconds actually) and put on a bid of £30. At that time it was at £24 and I managed to get it for £28.
So today it turned up, and I unpacked it, and found it's actually not a bad camera as a rebuild project.
There are a few things wrong which don't matter in terms of taking pictures (like chips in the prism & focusing screen and a dent in the filter ring), a few which do matter, but I think I can fix (like the aperture not closing and general dirt), and one thing which doesn't work, and I don't know if I can fix it (the shutter second curtain doesn't move).
So here I go - I've no idea if I can fix this, but it's going to be interesting having a try. I'll post updates as/if I manage to get things fixed.
This post is part of a series: My Pentacon six project
