Did some Aperture Science (and photos from the Pen)

Haaaaaa. Puns!

OK so if you didn't see the post I just made, this is a follow-up to a video:

https://youtu.be/li0F2HWaZX4

So first, yes absolutely the aperture is between two glass elements. So... hah. And because I re-assembled the black camera and then it had a sticky aperture again I decided... well time to remove the dang thing! Just three screws hold on the assembly with the aperture and out it comes. Disassembling it from there, though, is NOT FUN. You can see in that first photo some teeny tiny washers. Yeah. Tweezers were invaluable here.

But! Once it's all apart you can give it a nice, thorough cleaning with alcohol and some Q-tips. Worked quite well, and also gave me an opportunity to make sure the lens elements were clean as could be.

And an interesting thing - I decided to pull the aperture blade assembly out of the trashed camera because I was having issues with part of it binding in the grey camera. That meant I had all three of these cameras disassembled and probably the trashed one was the newest! They each had interesting revisions. The grey camera (probably the oldest) used brass slotted screws to hold the blade assembly to the lens. My original black one used Philips (or probably JIS) screws, and the single washer on the far side was welded to the carrier! Much less finicky. But the trashed one? They had just gotten rid of the washers! They stamped the blade carrier with a few raised ridges surrounding the screw holes, allowing it to support itself. Shoulda done that from the start!

Oh, and you might be wondering: a square aperture? Yep! That totally works, and about the only downside is that, when you have lens flare, it's weeeeird. But also pretty neat! The picture with the sign exhibits it in the background (though it's pretty subtle). And although this camera only takes half-frames, if you can get a good scan out of those negatives you'd be surprised what kind of detail it can resolve. Frankly I was blown away at how much detail a 50+ year old consumer camera using a film cheat code could resolve.

OK so that's it! These cameras are as simple as they are fascinating, and really unless you get one that was seemingly left in a steam room like my one example, there's not a whole lot that can't be fixed with some elbow grease. And since it wasn't completely clear at the end: indeed, I now have another perfectly functional camera! These things are neat.