That sticky shutter button on my old Canon FTb drove me nuts for weeks

Picked up a Canon FTb at a garage sale in Portland last spring and the shutter button felt like it was sticking halfway down. Tried blowing compressed air in there but no luck. Ended up taking the top plate off and found a glob of old dried up grease near the release mechanism. Cleaned it out with some isopropyl and a q-tip and now it fires smooth as butter. Anyone else run into old lubricant turning into glue on these older SLRs?

2 comments

2 Comments

bettykim1mo ago

Right? That old lubricant turns into straight up glue, it's ridiculous. My Minolta SRT-101 had the exact same problem, the mirror would get stuck halfway up every time I tried to take a shot. Got so mad I almost threw it against a wall, but then I found a tiny screwdriver set at a thrift store and took the whole bottom plate off. There was this yellow crusty gunk all over the shutter mechanism, like someone had squeezed a tube of Elmer's in there twenty years ago and forgot about it.

park.iris1mo ago

Wait, has anyone else ever cleaned out a camera and found like, what you described but also some dead insect parts mixed in? My buddy found a whole dried up earwig in his Pentax Spotmatic once. He was in the same boat, mirror stuck, thought it was the usual old grease. Took the bottom off and there was this crusty earwig corpse jammed between the shutter blades and the old lubricant had basically mummified it into the mechanism. He said he had to use a toothpick to chip it off piece by piece, and the smell was like old books and motor oil combined.

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