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Serious question, did I waste 4 months refusing to touch mirrorless shutters?
Three years ago I ran a small shop in Boise and turned away every mirrorless body that came through the door, mostly because an old tech I knew kept saying the leaf shutters were sealed units you can't service. Last month a customer brought in a Fuji X100 with a stuck blade and I told her it was a paperweight, she looked at me like I was speaking another language. Then I watched a guy in Portland do a full teardown on YouTube and replace the whole assembly in under an hour with a $12 part, and I felt like the biggest idiot in Idaho. Has anyone here actually rebuilt a leaf shutter without the factory jig, or am I about to break three of them learning?
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the_oliver1d ago
Man, I feel for you on this one because that old tech probably cost you a lot of money and a lot of sleep over the years. I did the same thing for a while, not with leaf shutters but with certain autofocus modules, just parroting what someone told me was "impossible" without ever cracking one open myself. The truth is a lot of those "sealed unit" stories come from an era when the factory wanted you to send stuff back, not from the parts actually being unserviceable. As for rebuilding one without the jig, yeah it is doable but you will mess up the first one or two getting the blade timing right, so practice on a dead body first. Buy a couple of cheap broken X100 shutters off eBay and tear those down before you touch a customer's camera. The blades gotta go back in the exact order and orientation, so take pictures at every step, way more than you think you need. You didn't waste four months, you just learned late, and that happens to everybody in this trade at some point.
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