Zorki IIc focusing problems

Hey All,

 

Long time and great to see so many still around.

 

My first ever vintage camera is a Zorki IIc. It is not great to use, with it's two different tiny windows for focusing and framing, but it used to work and I got some decent results, I like that Industar-50 lens.

 

A couple of weeks ago i put a roll through it and everything was horribly out of focus. I repeated the experiment - same result, carefuly checking I was extending the lens properly.

 

I took it to my friendly camera technician who was a bit busy with far more worthy cameras than my Zorki. He found the back element of the lens had come loose and was about to fall out, he tightened that for me and then checked the focus in his weird microscope machine and said it was out - that when focused to infinity the scale was reading 20 feet.

 

So there are two issues - one getting the lens to be focused at infinity when clicked into the infinity lock, and then adjusting the rangefinder.

 

further this is complicated by the back not coming off to allow for checking focus like you would with another camera with a piece of ground glass.

 

Has anyone here had direct experience with these cameras?

When you set the focus to the infinity stop (on the lens), does the rangefinder concur?

I would look for another Leica thread mount 50mm lens before doing anything with the camera. The F/2.0 Jupiter 8 often fitted to the later Zorki's 4 and 4K is a very good lens and can often be found quite cheaply. It's not retractable so won't fit in an ever ready case. Edited March 10, 2021 by John Seaman