Jumpy metering on FE

Hi, I'm wanting to travel with my old Nikon FE camera. I changed the batteries and cleaned the contacts in the battery chamber with contact cleaning spray, as initially the charge from the new batteries was not registering (but no, the old batteries had not leaked). The battery test leaver gives a nice bright and consistent red signal on the LED, however, when I look through the viewfinder and adjust the aperture, the meter's needle sometimes jumps around madly, especially in bright light and especially in adjustments between F8 and F11, if that means anything. Are there other user-accessible contacts that I can try cleaning? Thanks!

The red light is not really reliable and was removed from the FE2. (A shame for me, because I normally remove the batteries from the camera and the check light was a quick way to confirm if the camera had batteries or not.)

 

Anyway, new batteries are not always as reliable as one could wish even if they light up the battery check, especially if you use LR44 (alkaline).

If you don't have replacements, I would first order a new set of batteries, two SR44 (Silver Oxide) or one CR-1/3 N (Lithium) - the latter is best as the risk of leaking is lower and the shelf-life is very long.

Meanwhile, I would exercise the aperture ring hoping that the Ai coupling mechanism on the camera just needs some exercise from lack of use.

I am not aware how you actually get to the associated contacts under the Ai follower, but maybe someone more knowledgable can advice.

There are FE repair schematics floating around on the web, if you are comfortable reading those.

I think your battery is good. I think the problem is with the FRE resistor that coupled with the aperture ring. Tell me if you don't make any adjustment does the needle jump? If not it's the adjustments that make it jumps then it's the resistor.

I can't speak for the FE2 but on the FM2n working the aperture ring and shutter speed dial sometimes helps to clean the contacts. It is an easy thing to try.

Thanks NHSN, BeBu and James. Yes, jumps only on being adjusted but sometimes continues to jump when the aperture is "seated". Readjusting can fix it. Will continue to give the dials a work out and hopefully it'll get better. Just bought a couple more LR44s as a backup but will order a couple of CR-1/3 Ns for the FE and my F2. I would take the mechanical F2 with me but I'm going somewhere where getting robbed is a possibility, would prefer to lose the FE than the F2! :-)

Cheers,

Just Google "Jumpy NIkon FE meter needle." Sometimes, though, those jumpy needles are symptomatic of irreparable age-related wear-and-tear. I pitched a Nikkormat EL not long ago with that problem. You're looking at a 40+ year-old camera.

I know what you're saying. I've had this camera for at least 30 of those 40+ years and I fear that I may suffer the same fate :-)

Post script: Have given up on the idea of taking it, did a test again this morning and it seems worse than it was yesterday. I'll take it to technician when I get back to see if it's worth fixing. Thanks all for the input.

Best luck would be finding a long-time repair shop with new-old parts on-hand. About 10 years ago a local shop had a new old-stock meter part for a Pentax K1000 that repaired a non-working meter in a Spotmatic F I had purchased that looked like-new and worked similarly except for the meter.

 

Us F2 users are lucky in having Sover Wong, who can bring F2 meter-heads back to life and has brand new, better than the originals, resistors for the DP3/12 LED meter heads.

For the FM, the position on the resistor changes with both shutter speed/ASA value, and aperture setting.

 

You note that it is between f/8 and f/11, but that should change if you change the shutter speed.

 

Worst case, you use it in manual mode, with an external meter.

 

Last time I checked my FE2 meter, it was consistently two stops off.

No jumping, just wrong. I set the offset value to compensate.

 

Or maybe it was right, and with the offset, two stops off.