FED 2C Flea Market Find And Restoration

Dave Colangelo · May 1, 2016

I was at the Flea Market this weekend ad found a pretty nice FED2. Its basically a Leica knockoff made the the USSR. For what its worth they are not really that terribly made, nice all metal construction with a solid built. If I had to summarize it I would say everything is just slightly off. The tolerances are not as tight as they could be and everything is just not quite as smooth as it should be. On any note for $20 it was not a bank breaker and i figured it would be a fun adventure. I ran a roll of T-Max400 though it (pics coming as soon as I get them from the lab) and everything was making the right noises and I assume its working. The only issue I had with it was that the aperture blades had some pretty large grease deposits on the inner edges. While this is probably not a big deal I decided id clean them up and get some of dust out of the lens while I was in there.

Before Cleanup

The lens is a thread mount and comes off pretty easily

You can see the grease on the blade edges

To split the lens the outer most ring in the barrel needs to be removed

Once the ring is out the lens comes apart pretty easily

The front element was a bit strange and did not come out as expected. I opted to remove the rear element but either way I would have access to the blade edges (spanners were a key tool for all this)

Cleaned up the blades with some napthal and then let them dry out. Some rust came off in the process which was nice and its looking a lot better.

Got some of the gunk off the various parts with 0000 wool just to make it look a bit better and reassembled it all.

If the test shots come out well ill run some exposure control tests to see if all the shutter speeds are working as they should.

Regards
Dave

dxqcanada · May 1, 2016

Hmm, I would have guessed the front element would just unscrew ?

Dave Colangelo · May 1, 2016

dxqcanada said:
Hmm, I would have guessed the front element would just unscrew ?

That was my assumption as well but it basically moved a 1/4 turn then froze again. Upon closer examination the threads do not even extend all the way up the barrel so Im not sure how it got in there in the first place. I didn't want to force it so the other end was worth a shot and turned out to work nicely.

limr · May 1, 2016

Nice! I'm a fan of the Ruskies. I've got a Zorki 6 and a Lubitel, myself. The Industar lenses tend to be nice and sharp.

Dave Colangelo · May 3, 2016

The pictures came in today and much to my surprise were far better than expected. There is really only one problem, the film carrier is not lined up properly so a small portion of the toothed section ends up in the exposure area. This causes the negatives to be about 1mm to high on the real (not a big deal but Im going to try and fix it). Here are some samples (you can see a bit of a black border from the scans as a result of the offset.

jcdeboever · May 4, 2016

Well done. Any suggestions on where to order some tools for camera repair? I have been making do but I trust there are a few that would make life a lot easier.

Dave Colangelo · May 4, 2016

jcdeboever said:
Well done. Any suggestions on where to order some tools for camera repair? I have been making do but I trust there are a few that would make life a lot easier.

Yes of course!

As for screw drivers and tweezers I just use typical watch makers stuff (the bench in the pictures is actually an old watchmakers bench). You can get a set online just do a search for "watchmakers screwdrivers" the skys the limit with price but a decent set (around $30) will do. The key is to keep them sharp, they are pretty easy to sharpen yourself with something like this. I just picked up a set of rubber lens openers for my other projects from amazon. They are good if there is no point holes for a pair of spanners and if there is an element that you need to break the glaze on with spanners but takes a lot of turns to get out. I also picked up a set of spanners which are the common tool for opening lenses. I have been oiling parts with watch oil and a watch oiler (which is really just a needle) and seen some pretty good results. You can grab the simple things like Q-Tips and Napthal at your local drug store or hardware store. I try to use lint free paper (also common in watch making) to set parts down on when I remove them. Little trays like this can be really helpful to keep parts organized if the repair is going to take some time. Thats about all i can think off off hand but if you have a specific question feel free to message me.

Regards
Dave