In my quest to remove the variables contributing to borked negatives I decided to clean the mirror in the Coolscan IV tonight.
This fine film-scanner has been following me around in itinerant mode for the last five years from place to place, including a spell in deep underground storage near Bristol, UK, and must be at least eight years old. I’ve never touched the insides but a nagging feeling of a dusty mirror has been at the back of my mind for a while.
I’ve been dismantling things for years in a kind of hit and miss way, with some fairly spectacular misses. Including (recently) a fucked Leitz VIHOO finder that I had to send to Malcolm Taylor for repair in the end. In this case it wasn’t my fault because I took it apart and reassembled it OK (I took it apart because there was a hair in the finder that was driving me nuts. It changed position at each focal length selection in a horrible ‘fluttery’ way. I ended up staring at and raging at the hair instead of concentrating on what else I could see through the finder). What I wasn’t to know was that a previous owner, probably around 30 years ago according to Malcolm, had done exactly the same as me, but while (clumsily) re-assembling it had chipped the prisms. Like a timebomb, the tiny pieces of glass waited down the decades until yours truely disturbed them and they promptly jammed the focal length selector ring on re-assembly. I got rid of the hair though, so on a sliding scale of 1-10 there was some success (2/10). Interesting side-note, I picked up the VIHOO from a batch being dumped by the apocryphal Russian oligarch (allegedly, and yes, I do want to believe it). Times must be hard for collectors/oligarchs and presumably he (and I assume the oligarch was a ‘he’) just looked at the VIHOO in a glass case rather than through it or the hair would have driven him nuts too.
Lets not revisit, age 14, the grandmother clock that will forever be a pile of springs and cogs and a hands-free clockface. Jeez, was I sick over that one. And how do you hide such a collossal fuck-up from the proud owners? That really was a ‘ticking’ timebomb, not.
On the other hand I can (or could) strip a bicycle down to the ball-bearings and put it together with my eyes closed, AND have a dramatic performance increase as a result, so it isn’t all cack-hands. Just an enquiring mind and a complete lack of responsibility and respect for age and value…
So with this in mind I knuckled down and took it apart. Ha! How difficult does this have to be? On the face of it, the mirror is completely inaccesible. Good one Nikon. Presumably pimping for expensive cleaning bills since you have to dismantle the thing to get at the mirror and as a fall-back, expensive repair bills from failed attempts.
Luckily, the interweb is here and a guy called Sebastian in California had already done the pain although the photos are a bit murky, it was clear enough to follow and took about half an hour. The mirror was awkward ro remove though, and the potential for scratching/breaking the small bit of glass is high. The best tip is turning it the scanner upside down so the mirror doesn’t DROP OUT when you remove the bracket. I really should repeat that. The best tip is turning it the scanner upside down so the mirror doesn’t DROP OUT when you remove the bracket. Yeah, I hadn’t read that far when mine dropped out. I like to live on the edge a bit and get the frisson before I’m told the bleeding obvious. Anyway, that was probably the only real sweaty palm moment. Although why my fingers start trembling uncontrollably at the crucial moment I’ll never understand…
Anyway, as they say, JOB DONE. Have to see what a difference it makes with the next scans… Hat-tips to Sebastian.
by skinnyvoice
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