F2(F2sb) Battery/Power Problem

I'm having an issue with one of my F2s. I mention the F2sb in the title because it's the body that came with my DP-3 finder, but the problem seems to follow the body and not the finder.

 

I'll start off by saying that there was no visible or apparent battery damage when I bought the camera. I fitted two new batteries(Energizer SR76s, in date and fine in other cameras). Initially, it was dead so I used a pencil eraser to clean the battery cover, battery chamber contacts, and the contacts between the prism and body. When I did that, it came to life with an accurate meter(although I'm not sure if DP-3s drift or lose calibration like DP-1s and DP-11s).

 

If I let the camera sit a few weeks, it will often be "dead" when I return to it. Cleaning the battery chamber usually fixes it. Over the past couple of days, it has refused to work a few additional but "flicking" the battery chamber door or smacking the camera(gently) on the bottom seems to fix it for a little while.

 

The DP-3 seems to not have issues on any other body, and DP-1s and DP-11s seem to be intermittent on this body also. I haven't checked a DP-2 or DP-12-I suppose I should. The DP-12 should draw the same amount of power as the DP-3(since they're effectively the same finder) although I'm not sure if a DP-1/DP-11 would draw more or less and I have no idea where a DP-2 would fall in there.

 

Does anyone have any ideas as to where I might look for a problem?

Remove the batteries till ready to use? If it isn't used for weeks...how much of a problem? The only time I have trouble with my old Nikons is when I inadvertently leave the meter switched on when I put them in the cabinet.

Don't use a pencil eraser. If anything common sense would dictate that it may even deposit a rubber residue, but that's just my speculation. And yes I have had the same problem on a DP2 finder, somewhat regularly. I found that the 2 contacts on top of the camera were the offenders. I would regularly have to use a q tip and 99% isopropyl to remedy it. But it always recurred. I think the biggest problem is that with age, a tarnish had developed on all contact surfaces. I found that 1200 grit wet or dry sandpaper on all contacts gave the longest lasting remedy. One of the body top contacts has a plastic shroud around it, so be careful with sandpaper. If you opt for an eraser, perhaps one of the old style abrasive typewriter erasers would do better than a plain pencil eraser. What I've said goes for the battery compartment contacts also. In the end, I found the DP2 to be a finder where I was just going to have to live with this problem. Perhaps the bias potentiometer may need a little tweeking from factory setting. But I don't advise fooling with that. Not being experienced, you may find that applying a fine screwdriver to the pot adjusting screw bends back the potentiometer, risking breaking the fine wires that serves as its mount.

Another possible source of trouble might be the switch which turns the power on when the advance lever is moved away from the body. One way of checking is, with the batteries inserted and metering head removed, use a multimeter to measure the voltage between the two contacts which transfer power from body to head. You should see it jump from zero to 3V when you move the advance lever.

Yup! Check not only the voltage but also the resistance. You may discover poor connection.

Barring the good suggestions mentioned above being the problem, I suspect the bias potentiometer in the finder head may be a wee set a wee bit low. Any tarnishing of contacts being enough to drop just enough power for LED cutoff. I have discovered turning up the bias from its extreme lowest position to a certain point causes the LED's to light. Turning it up too far causes them to be too sensitive to f stop settings to the point where you can't get both of them to light at the same time unless the aperture ring isn't set absolutely perfectly. Obviously I am talking about the DP2 finder. I understand the DP3 and DP12 used a different LED arrangement from DP2's two inward pointing arrows. But speculation suggests they have bias pots also.

Your intermittent electrical problem is likely to be a corrosion or cold solder issue somewhere in the internal wires running from the body battery chamber to top deck prism contacts, or perhaps the advance lever switch as others suggested. If your DP3 prism functions reliably and perfectly if left mounted on a different F2 body for a few weeks, then the problem is not likely to be located in the prism (I wouldn't tamper with the internals unless you're quite sure the issue is in the prism). The fact your other meter prisms show the same intermittent issues on the suspect body, while working reliably on other bodies, indicates this one F2 body as the culprit.

 

You might have a simple external tarnish or faint corrosion issue that is resistant to the pencil eraser trick. I've run across a camera now and then that seems to have dead power, that isn't fixed by the pencil eraser or alcohol methods. In such cases, scrubbing the battery chamber spring and top deck contacts with a cotton bud moistened in white vinegar brought the camera back to life. Give that a try: if it doesn't solve the problem for any length of time this F2 body needs to be serviced or replaced.

 

Over many years and many F2 cameras, I've found the DP3 to be a remarkably durable, stable meter prism: ironic, given it had the briefest production run of them all. I recently acquired another complete F2SB camera for $79 that looks like it was shelled in WWII, the entire prism housing is worn down to the literal brass, yet it fired right up with new batteries and meters perfectly. The subsequent DP12 is nearly as durable, but its funky AI modifications make the mechanics slightly more fragile and I've had a couple that "drifted" to a degree requiring professional servicing (the dreaded FRE failure). Their silicon blue cells and smaller, lower-power LEDs tend to keep more DP3/DP12 prisms operational than the older DP2 (CdS cells + high-draw lamps + questionable electronics) or DP1/DP11 (CdS, galvanometer).

Edited June 28, 2018 by orsetto

Thank you orsetto. It is obvious your expertise is greater than mine.

The metering prism may not be the problem at all.

 

Theres a wiring 'loom' inside the camera taking power from the battery box in the base of the camera to contacts for the metering prism. It's possible that there's a break in the wiring, or more likely a faulty battery box or dry joint or corroded contact between the battery box and the wiring loom.

 

I had the (almost) exact same symptoms on an F2, which were due to a fractured contact plate in the bottom of the battery box.

 

I was able to obtain a new battery box from Nikon at the time, and thought it would be a 10 minute fix to remove the old box and replace it - wrong!

Two days later, after stripping down the camera to remove the mirror box, I finally gained access to the single screw that holds the battery box in place. Re-assembly was quite quick, since I literally knew the camera inside-out by that time.

 

Anyhoo. Unless you've time on your hands and good repair skills; it might be worth living with the intermittent fault. And a professional repairer might charge a small fortune to fix that 'simple' fault.

No wonder the plain prisms are so sought after.

Thanks everyone for the suggestions.

 

I'll spend some time with a VOM and see if I can isolate it.

 

FWIW, I had considered the possibility of the switch being the issue. When it happens, I generally try clicking the advance lever in and out several times with the idea being that doing so would hopefully clean a dirty contact. So far, that has never produced results.

 

I've been meaning to send at least one of my F2s to Sover Wong-I know he's expensive but with as much as I love the F2 I'd like to have him service at least one body. My F2AS(with an 80 serial number) was the one I'd planned to send, but I may send this one instead.

I have been tricked before by a Nikkormat with a corroded battery wire leading from the battery chamber. There was no obvious corrosion; everything looked clean as a whistle. Upon extremely close inspection I noticed a speck of green where the battery wire soldered to the battery box. I removed that wire and out of curiosity, stripped the wire back about an inch. I discovered the stranded wire had actually wicked corrosion up the length of the wire like a candle wick. But because it was inside it's insulation, the wire looked beautiful. That wicked corrosion had attacked the copper strands so badly, the wire had no conductivity at all. So I replaced what appeared to be a beautiful wire and the problem was solved. So now I know--stranded wire can act just like a candle wick to battery corrosion, whereas everything looks clean and pretty to the eye.

Many years ago, I had a decent business going of rebuilding Canon High Power Battery Pack FNs for the New F-1 motor drive. It was decent money when I was in college, although looking back now it was too much time for a $40 profit.

 

Every single one I rebuilt had corrosion on the circuit board. The NiCds were internally isolated from it, but every single one had leaked and wicked to the board via wires. Fortunately, the board damage was almost always superficial(and the traces large enough that I could repair the one or two I found that had more extensive damage). By rebuilds always required replacing the wires from the batteries to the circuit board, though, as they were always bad.

Thank you orsetto. It is obvious your expertise is greater than mine.

 

Thanks, but I wouldn't flatter myself as having "expertise". More like, I'm old enough to have been a teenager lusting after the F2SB in 1976 when it was still being sold new. And churned thru enough used F/F2 bodies with various meter heads since 1988 that I've experienced most of the failure modes (which aren't many). The most common failure points I've seen on the F2 are advance mechanism slop, wiring corrosion, and (rarely) dead high shutter speeds on bodies that were left cocked on a shelf for ten years before I bought them. And needle-based Photomics tended to flake more than the LED heads. With todays sky-high repair prices and scarcity of trustworthy local techs, the repair or replace decision can be very hard. Personally, I draw the line at spending hundreds of dollars for a complete teardown, so if I run up against internal wire failure in an F2, it usually gets dumped even if its pristine otherwise. The labor fee to replace the wiring is astronomical, but its fast becoming the only option as supplies of decent F2 bodies have dried up on eBay (along with Hasselblads, Rolleis, Mamiyas: seems like a great time to be a mechanical camera tech in North America).

 

Back in the early 1990s, Nikon would actually sell end users any repair parts they had in stock (as long as you knew the correct SKU number to ask them for). I was a little more adventurous then, and of course the cameras were still high value, so I did attempt (and succeed) at a couple hair-raising DP-12 (AS) meter prism repairs that I had no business trying. When the AI meter coupling shoe assembly failed in both my F2AS bodies in the same month, I begged the Nikon phone rep in Melville NY to pretend I had the correct part numbers, and he shipped me the assemblies (aka "pantagraphs") @ $99. The AI coupling assembly pops off as a single module after removing the prism nameplate and three screws, but getting the meter to align accurately with the new assembly required three hands and a white knuckle couple hours. No memory how I finally got them aligned, and I stupidly didn't take notes, so I would never try it again today (the AI assembly has been unobtanium since 1995 anyway).

Edited June 28, 2018 by orsetto

With todays sky-high repair prices and scarcity of trustworthy local techs, the repair or replace decision can be very hard. Personally, I draw the line at spending hundreds of dollars for a complete teardown, so if I run up against internal wire failure in an F2, it usually gets dumped even if its pristine otherwise.

 

About 10 years ago, I had a New F-1 body that needed a major service. I debated about it for a while, but at the time that was still reliably a $150-250 camera on Ebay. I knew that I COULD buy another, but ended up sending it to Ken Oikawa in California. He was head of the West Coast Canon service center in the 80s, and is legendary in the FD-mount community as being "the guy" for F-1 service(kind of like Sover Wong for F2s).

 

In any case, he advised me that the camera needed what he called a "Class C" service-it differed from his "Class B" service in that it required replacement of key parts(he told me what it was, but I couldn't quite understand what he said). In any case, I agreed to his $175 charge.

 

I COULD have replaced it with another, but I justified the repair cost by saying that I was effectively getting a new camera instead of taking a gamble with Ebay. Of course, that comes with the caveat that, like F2s and F3s, Canon F-1s very rarely have issues.

 

Still, an F2AS is reliably running $300+ these days, and I consider the cost of Sover Wong doing a service and replacing the "finger" plate in the DP-12(I don't know its technical name) to be worthwhile vs. buying an unknown. I figure too that if I'm going to ship to the UK, I might as well toss the body it's attached to in and have that serviced at the same time. The few times I've had a classic camera serviced by a known tech, I feel like there's a certain confidence that comes with KNOWING that the camera is ready to go for probably far more than I will ever use it. That's especially true of Japanese cameras, which for the most part seem to just keep going and going for a long time after they're new or serviced.

 

BTW, out of 6 or 7 Nikon Fs I have, I only have one where the shutter speeds are noticeably off and the low speeds dead. I think I'm up to 10 F2s the last time I bothered to count(including at least one of all the meter variants, and several DP-1 and DP-11s), and all of them are mechanically perfect-the only one I've had an issue with is the one that is the subject of this thread.

6 months later, I thought I'd report a "fix" to this, although it's not really a fix.

 

A few months ago, I bought a late F for $200. It had an MD motor drive, which was a nice bonus, but the real attraction to the camera was that it had been fitted with a DE-1 eye level finder from an F2. Anyone who's followed prices on these know that this is an alarmingly pricey and expensive finder.

 

At the time I bought that camera, I did a bit of parts switching to make a presentable F. Someone had removed the name plate to make the F2 finder fit. I had a parts F body around that yielded a name plate, although it didn't have a direct path to this particular F...the parts camera was from the 6.4 million serial block, and came with a non-working flag photomic. I had another 6.4 million F that unfortunately had been cut up(both around the eyepiece and the name plate) to fit a Photomic FTN. In any case, though, I ended up putting together a nice original-ish flag Photomic without "notches" in the name plate for an FTN finder, then put an FTN on the MD-equipped camera.

 

With all of that out of the way, it still left me with a DE-1, which I put on an F2 that had a "flaky" (two stops off and occasionally jumpy) DP-1.

 

I got the F2SB out again the other day, and of course it had quit working again. So, the solution was obvious at least to me-I just stuck the DE-1 on the F2 body that has power issues, and put the DP-3 on the other F2 body(which has no power issues).

 

The problematic body is black-I only have two black F2s, but like the look overall. I have to admit, though, that I think the DE-1 looks best on a black body at least since all I've seen are black.

 

So, at least for now everything is settled and happy.

 

I'm still waiting for my turn to come up on Sover Wong's waiting list, which I expect should be next July or August...I'll just have to figure out which cameras to send. I'll most likely have this one fixed.

Funny how the previously unwanted meterless prisms have become desired.

Anyone who's followed prices on these know that this is an alarmingly pricey and expensive finder.

 

- Yep! There certainly are some lunatic prices asked for a DE-1 on ebay at the moment. What on earth is wrong with just ignoring the fact that there's a meter in the prism? Whether it works or not.

 

Thanks for drawing this to my attention BTW. I might just sell the DE-1 off my 'spare' F2 and buy something actually useful.