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Ruined a customer's Pentax spotmatic repair when my tweezers slipped, learned a trick to catch it early
Last Tuesday I was working on a Spotmatic F from 1973 that a guy drove 40 miles from Tacoma to drop off, and I was deep into the shutter assembly trying to reseat a tiny spring near the curtain roller. My tweezers slipped and launched that spring straight into the body cavity, and I just froze because I knew it was gone somewhere behind the mirror box. I spent 25 minutes with a flashlight and a magnet wand poking around, getting more and more nervous since the customer had already paid a $90 deposit and this was supposed to be a two day job. What saved me was a cheap trick I picked up from an old repair guy years back: I taped a piece of nylon stocking over the end of my shop vac hose and gently sucked around the cavity, and the spring stuck to the stocking instead of vanishing into the vacuum. After that I started doing the pantyhose-over-vacuum thing on every teardown before I even touch the shutter, just as a safety net for screws and springs. It has caught three screws and a ball bearing in the last month alone. Does anyone here mark their workbench zones for parts that fly, or do you just learn to work slower and pray?
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thomas_butler2d ago
Magnetic trays beat bench zones since parts stick instead of rolling away.
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