Turns out a lot of old Minolta shutter issues are just dried grease

I was digging through some old repair manuals I got from a retired guy in Ohio last month, and he had a note about the Minolta SRT series. He said something like 70% of shutter timing problems he saw were from the old lube turning to glue, not broken parts. I spent like 3 hours cleaning and relubing one yesterday that was off by a full stop at 1/1000, and it's dead on now. Has anyone else run into that being way more common than actual gear damage on those bodies?

2 comments

2 Comments

west.anna12d ago

Wait, is it actually that common? I heard from a guy on a different board that he fixed like six X-700s just by cleaning the old grease out of the shutter mechanism. He said one was stuck at 1/60 no matter what you set it to, and after a good clean with lighter fluid and fresh lube it worked perfectly. I tried it on a beat-up XG-M I found at a thrift store, and it went from skipping speeds to dead accurate. Makes me wonder how many cameras got tossed because people thought they were broke for good.

the_lee12d ago

Well @west.anna, you raise a good point there. Thing is, most people just assume if a camera acts up it's a lost cause. What gets me is that even tech repair shops used to charge more for cleaning than the camera was worth, so it made more sense to toss them than to fix them. I'd bet there are whole boxes of perfectly fixable Minoltas sitting in landfills just because nobody knew a little lighter fluid would do the trick.