New light seals for a 25 euro Canonet

The listing on Tori said "rikki", broken, and under that "laukaisin ei toimi", the release does not work. A Canon Canonet QL17 GIII, with a fixed 40mm f/1.7 lens. Thirty euros. I offered twenty, we agreed on twenty-five, and early this month I collected it from a man in Vallila who was emptying a storage room and did not want to talk about the camera at all.

I had read enough to have a guess before I paid. With no battery the meter reads as if it were completely dark, and in automatic mode the camera refuses to fire. At home I turned the aperture ring off A to f/8 and the shutter fired at every speed from 1/500 down to 1/4. The quarter second even sounded like a quarter second. So the shutter was fine. The foam was not, as I found when I opened the back.

Like most cameras of its age it used foam to keep light out around the back, and after forty or fifty years that foam had gone black and sticky. On this one it sat in the grooves along the top and bottom of the body, where the edge of the door closes, and in a strip by the hinge. It came off on my fingers.

I covered the kitchen table with newspaper and got out a small bottle of isopropyl alcohol, a box of wooden toothpicks and some cotton buds. I softened a short stretch with alcohol, scraped it, wiped it, and nearly always had to go over it again. I used wooden toothpicks so as not to scratch anything. It helps that the Canonet has its shutter in the lens, so behind the open back there is no shutter curtain to poke a hole in. With the Bessa I would not have dared.

It took most of two evenings.

For the new seals I bought a sheet of thin self-adhesive black foam and cut strips with a craft knife against a steel ruler. Some people put black knitting yarn in the grooves instead. My mother offered to post me some and was a little hurt when I said I already had foam. The groove strips were the fiddly part. My first two were too wide and I peeled them out again. The hinge strip went on in one try.

Then the battery. The meter was made for a 1.35 volt mercury cell, the PX625, which nobody sells any more. I did what the forums suggest and bought zinc-air hearing aid batteries, size 675, in a card of six from the pharmacy by my tram stop. They are smaller than the original, so I put a rubber O-ring from the hardware shop round one to keep it in the middle of the compartment. After that the battery check button beside the eyepiece lit its lamp, and the meter agreed with the Bessa on the kitchen wall to within about half a stop.

One disappointment: the film speed dial stops at 800. My winter HP5 at 1600 stays with the Bessa.

The test roll was HP5 at box speed. Loading took seconds, which is what the QL in the name is for: you lay the leader across to a mark, close the back and wind on. I shot it over a week, mostly between home and work, plus one lunch hour around Hakaniemi, and on Thursday I left it on the windowsill for an afternoon with the back turned to the sun. This morning I developed it at the kitchen sink, the same way as always, and hung it from the shower rail.

Held up to the light, most of it looks clean. The rebates are clear and the windowsill frames are nothing worse than badly composed pictures of a radiator. The last couple of frames show a faint grey smudge along the edge on the hinge side. It could be nothing, or it could be the hinge strip. I will look at it on the light pad tonight and scan it properly next week. Another roll goes in tomorrow either way.