sllɐqǝʎǝʎzznɟ

A friend passed me her sick Cosina CX-2 last week and asked if I could so something to revive the film advance counter. I am not sure if she knows I ain’t got no training in neither mechanical or electronic repair but I took up the task (and risk!) and brought this ‘patient’ home. The film counter was stuck at some particular number (was it 28?) and doesn’t reset when the back is opened. Advancing the film doesn’t do any good either.

As I hardly got much time to work on it, I could only spare minutes here and there to try opening it up and look at what the problem was. Yeah right … as if I know what to do. 😀 To my surprise, the top cover of this camera is pretty easily removed. Just 2 screws at the back, 2 screws below the film rewind crank and a hidden snap-on thingie in front below the leather (?) covering.

Opening up was simple but … here comes the headache. Figuring out what went wrong. It’s my first time trying to ‘fix’ a sleeping film counter so it took my old (fuzzy) eyes some time to look and figure out how the film advance mechanism is suppose to work. Probably 10 minutes later, I figured out (roughly) what went wrong and with a trembling hand, carefully placed the few little parts in their right place. Oh well, at least where I though they should be. Next, with a few drops of lighter fluid, I cleaned up some dirt and some other crap that doesn’t seem to belong there.

Done!

Nope! Now it works and the film counter resets to ‘S’ when I open up the camera back. But … the counter advances a bit when I turn the film advance wheel but soon jumps back to ‘S’! Damn! Trouble #2!!

It seems that the small thin metal part that is supposed to be pushed in by the back cover is not going all the way in, thus the film counter wasn’t ‘activated’. A couple of days later, after thinking hard of what to do to make the filmsy metal part go in deeper, trying a couple of ways to attached some thin plastic and metal to try reduce the distance from the camera back to the filmsy metal part … I decided to maybe bend it a little bit so that the back cover can push it in further. Eureka! Damn! It works!

So that’s it … a simple ‘story’ of how I got this camera back alive. My fingers got all tired after trying to advance and firing the shutter … 36 times … and I did this 3 times! So that’s … errr … 92349 times? No? Oh fuck it … I can’t count! Now I’ve to get her to massage my finger when I return the camera to her. Muwahaha!

It’s pretty strange to think about it … the Cosina CX-2 was the first film ‘Lomo’ camera I bought when I started getting curious about Lomography and film stuffs … and the owner of this camera is the same one who sold me her other Cosina CX-2 a couple of years ago! Hmm … maybe I shouldn’t be offering my help since she got me started into spending so much money on these old cameras and toy cameras … and film … and developing cost …