Testing the Rebuilt Shutter
Having rebuilt the shutter, I was feeling pretty good
about things, but wanted to make sure the shutter speeds were in fact firing
accurately. The same camera shops that had been unwilling to work on the camera
were not interested in testing it either (no big surprise here). I looked into
ordering the cheap version of the pocket shutterspeed tester sold by Fargo
Enterprises (incidentally, they appear to have about everything you could
want for camera repair if you have the budget for it). Unfortunately I couldn't
justify to myself the cost of the tester, given that if I got the repair right,
I'd not need the tester again for quite some time. I considered simply shooting
chromes of test charts to get a ring-around, but the cost of the materials didn't
seem a wise investment either. Eventually, I remembered something about video
refresh rates from when I worked for a video company. I did some looking, and
sure enough, came up with the time it takes for a standard North American TV
set to paint a single line of dots across the screen (62 or 66 microseconds
per line, I forget which now). I was set. I picked up my Polaroid
back (instant gratification being what it is), loaded it up with a sheet of
B&W film, turned the room lights off, the tv set brightness to max, and
proceeded to shoot a couple of frames at different shutter speeds, counting
the lines that appeared in each shot with a loupe. I had a winner, the shutter
was tight enough to shoot print without problems, and appeared consistently
close enough to make passable chromes..