My first camera - disassembly

[armando_m]

Pentax "Superprogram" 35mm SLR disassembly

My first camera, bought in 1984 or so...

It had been in a drawer for while, developing rust , the camera started to get stuck every once in a while, it has been unused for a number of years, at least since my honeymoon trip 15 yrs ago.

Instead of just throwing it away I decided to disassemble it and play with the shutter.

It is amazing how different it felt to the D300, tiny in comparison , thin body, only 2 of my fingers fit on the front to hold it, one on the trigger, thumb in the back, quite an unsecure feeling.

The body is alloy, had fake leather stickers in the front and back, the top cover is plastic, the rest of the covers are metal.

Amazingly the electronics is all surface mount components, at least for something bough in the early 80's, also amazing it work with only 2 small 1.5v batteries and they always lasted a long long time, I guess the most work they did was lift the mirror out of the way, all other things happened via spring loads after triggering small coils.

Exposure I'm guessing was measured by a couple of light cells on each side of the viewfinder.

1.Some of the parts


2. The shutter gears seen through the prism


I found how to operate the shutter manually ... here is a sequence

3.This is how it looks unloaded, both curtains closed


4.Loaded , the rear curtain opened:


5. Shutter triggered, front curtain also opens, exposing the film


6. This lever is pulled when the camera is loaded:


7. This lever opens the rear curtain, it is moved by an electric coil, I pushed it by hand:


8. When pressing here then both curtains close, ending the exposure


Top speed for a single curtain is , if understand correctly, what determines the flash sync speed, in this camera it was 1/125 of a second.
Faster exposures are obtained by closing the curtains with a space of time smaller than 1/125 of a sec, this camera in particular could do up to 1/2000 of a second.

[SmartWombat]

Right, instead of a single open/close exposing the whole frame at once, for higher speeds it becomes a travelling slit, with varying gap between the two shutter blades.
So for 1/500 the gap is 1/2 the frame, and with single electronic flash it illuminates only 1/2 the frame.
Bring back bulbs! I have one in a drawer somewhere ... wonder if I can still get the 22V batteries and flashbulbs?