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The dusty old camera repair bench at a flea market in San Antonio taught me more than 3 months of videos
I was walking through the Big Red Barn flea market in San Antonio on Saturday and this older guy had a whole camera repair setup on a folding table. He was fixing a Canon AE-1 with a stuck mirror and had about 15 tiny screwdrivers spread out on a felt cloth. I watched him work for maybe 20 minutes and he showed me how he tests a shutter with a slow motion phone video instead of fancy gear. He said he's been doing it 31 years and never bought a single service manual, just learned by taking broken bodies apart. The part that got me was how he cleans a focus screen with a piece of tape wrapped around his finger, no special tools at all. Does anyone here still use the tape trick or is that just an old school habit that's died out?
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ray_williams1d ago
The "tape wrapped around his finger" trick is real but I'd push back a little on it being totally tool free. That tape is doing the same job as a proper screen tool, it's just softer and has no edges to catch. The catch is you need the right tape, and regular scotch tape can leave glue residue on the screen that's a pain to get off later. He probably uses something low tack like painter's tape, which makes more sense. So it's less an old habit that died out and more a shortcut that still works if you know which tape to grab.
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