Image was taken with a Fujifilm X-E5 and XF 50mm f/2.0 WR lens

A few weeks ago I posted about An Oldie But Goodie – here

The camera I referenced in the link above was a Canon G-III QL 1.7. As soon as I sold that camera this one popped up on my radar. This is a Canon QL 1.9. The 1.7 had a 40mm f/1.7 lens and this camera has a 45mm 1.9 lens. Unlike the previous camera this shutter surprisingly worked (more about this later).

The light seals in this camera were deteriorated so that was my first project. While I was replacing the light seals I noticed some sort of film in between the rear lens elements so after I finished the light seals out came the spanner wrench to remove the rear lens group. Surprisingly I didn’t have to struggle with the tightness of this lens group and the job went quickly and more importantly smoothly. Now let’s get back to the shutter I mentioned earlier. The shutter would not fire when I purchased the camera but it was a $25 purchase so I wasn’t too disappointed. When I installed a new battery to see if the light meter worked I moved the aperture ring to “A” which placed the camera in shutter priority mode. I moved the film advance lever about one quarter of a stroke then pressed the shutter button and bingo the shutter fired. Obviously the battery must have died mid film advance when the previous owner last used it and it jammed the shutter. This baffled me a bit because this is a totally mechanical camera. Maybe one day I’ll try to figure out how a mechanical camera shutter can jam due to a dead button battery that powers the light meter.

The biggest job on this camera was cleaning and adjusting the rangefinder which took me about 90 minutes. To do this the top cover of the camera must be removed and a lot of finger crossing takes place because everything underneath the cover is brittle and fragile from age so my big sausage fingers had to be very careful. After cleaning the rangefinder glass a lot of tweaking took place on the horizontal and vertical adjustment screws to get the split image to align perfectly. After finishing this little gem I’m undecided whether I will run a roll of film through it. Only time will tell so stay tuned.