Copal 0 Shutter Repair

I purchased a Nagaoka wooden field camera and it came with a Nikkor lens and Copal 0 shutter assembly. The shutter made a rattle sound and did not close all the away. The lens had a very slight fungus in it, nothing that would impact image quality. I figured with all of that it was a write off so I decided to take it apart and see if I could fix it.

So I started to disassemble it, here is the shutter that will not close. Turns out after taking it apart one of the speed escapement screws had come out and wedged itself in the shutter blade grooves.


Here are the shutter blades, they just fell out when I turned it over


Shutter blades removed


Here it is pretty much taken apart


Here is the speed escapement, another problem I found after a couple of weeks of head scratching was the small spring wrapped around the small brass post had come undone. That basically caused the shutter to operate at one of the middle speeds all the time. After I figured out how the escapement mechanism worked I deduced it had a spring problem and removed the whole assembly and saw the loose spring.


Here is a close up of the speed escapement assembly


This shows the assembly with the speed escapement removed


This shows the assembly with the speed escapement and shutter blades installed


Time to put it all back together again, here is the speed cam installed. Best to line up the 1/15 first, turn to T and then with a small screwdriver pull out the blade stop lever pin to line it up in the speed cam


Final ring assemblies installed


Completed lens assembly done and ready to use, speeds all sound good but I have no way to test



****Update 07-30-2014****
Was finally able to get out and use the repaired shutter. The Goat Canyon Trestle in Anza Borrego Desert State Park.
Arista EDU ISO 100, Nikkor 135mm, f/64, 1/4, Y48 Filter
Seems to work great

Bighorn Sheep Count 2014

The Bighorn Sheep Count for 2014 was successful and no dead sheep like last year. With my back problems I had to go serious with ultra light backpacking. I needed to pack 4 days worth of stuff in my Mountain Smith TLS fanny pack. We had water cached at the count site already so all I needed to carry was 4 liters to get me up to Rattlesnake Spring in Anza Borrego Desert State Park. We left the parking areas as usual around 4:30pm so that we would catch mostly shade in the canyon on the way up. It is about a 3,000' ascent over 5 miles with some stretches of boulder hopping and climbing. We always take the route up with the dry fall which we ascend without a rope but haul the packs up with a light rope we carry along. It usually will take us about 6 hours to get to the spring so we arrive around 11pm. On our way out 3 days later we do the same thing, we leave in the evening to catch the shadows in the canyon and get to the vehicles just about dark at 8pm.

On my drive out to the desert I saw the Banner fire begin with just a small puff as I drove towards Dudleys Bakery, by the time I got to Ranchita it had turned into a big fire


Here is Gary & Randy at our count site. The spring is way down in the green brush. The sheep come in from all directions to drink, we just have to count, determine gender and type ie: Ram, Ewe, Lamb, Yearling. They can get mixed up pretty quick when there are 30 of them all down there so we also have to determine identifying features like scars, broken horns, etc. If we don't do that we will end up re-counting them again so it can get pretty tricky sometimes


Here are some sheep going down to the spring


Here they are drinking from the water hole


Here is what our count site looks like to the sheep


My entire setup for the trip


We managed to count 70 unique sheep over the 3 days we counted, that is a good number.

Thanks to everyone who volunteered their time to carry water to our count location, we could not do this without your help!