nina_jenkins•1mo agoProlific Poster

Hit 500 shutter repairs last month and it changed my mind about cleaning them

I always thought you had to fully disassemble and soak every shutter curtain to get them working right. That's the popular method on this forum, I know. But after fixing about 500 of them over 4 years in my shop in Portland, I found that just blowing out the old dust and oiling the pivot points fixes 8 out of 10 shutters. People say you're cutting corners, but my success rate is the same and I save 20 minutes per camera. Anyone else have a number of repairs that made them rethink the standard way?

3 comments

3 Comments

ryanburns1mo ago

Respectfully disagree here. I've taken apart hundreds of these things too and skipping the full clean just hides problems that show up again in 6 months. That dried out grease doesn't just blow away, it turns into a sticky mess deep inside the mechanism later. Quick fixes might pass your bench test but they dont hold up to real use.

ruby_patel271mo ago

sticky mess deep inside the mechanism" is spot on, but you might be missing that some of us run these tools way past what the manual says, in dusty or wet conditions they weren't designed for. I've had a few failures where the grease was actually fine, but a tiny bit of grit got trapped under a bearing race that a full clean would have caught. @ryanburns, you're right that quick fixes have limits, but a full teardown every time is overkill for stuff that gets treated like a work truck (like mine). Sometimes you just need to blow it out and re-lube the key spots to get another season out of it.

lopez.karen21d ago

Yep, I read an article that said most tool failures come from dust and grit, not just bad grease.