Milsurp After Hours

Made mid to late 60's, Miranda FV was from an innovative Japanese company that attempted to compete with the best on the market at the time. The company was started by a couple of Japanese engineers right after WWII. One of them had been associated with the Japanese rocket bomb made on the the order of the German V2. The company was left behind in the early 70's by companies that outspent and out performed them to the point they couldn't compete and went out of business after first selling out to someone using the name to make cheaper cameras.

This camera is unusual for it's time as an SLR. The prism can be exchanged for use as a top finder or to attach with a "scientific" finder to telescopes or microscopes. It had two shutter buttons...one that could also be hooked up to a shutter release cord but either could be used with the push of a finger. The film counter was next to the film advance lever and unusual in that when the shutter was cocked would show a red line and when not cocked a black line. It had a depth of field preview button. It was heavy metal construction and seems well made. It came in at a hefty about 34 oz.s with a 50mm lens. It is all mechanical and there is no built in light meter.

I tried it out today... but had some problems. After loading and making a few exposures I found the mechanical shutter would malfunction as the leaf shutter would stick at various apertures. I rewound the film.. too far as it turned out.. and then worked on loosening up the camera by firing it at all speeds and apertures until things seemed loosened up. Then, having only the one roll of film, with the leader now unusable inside the factory canister, proceeded to unload it in a dark bag and use a reloadable canister to reload it with the leader out. I loaded the camera again but it seemed not smoothly on track as I advanced the lever...but paid no attention as it seemed to be functioning and I wanted to see what kind of images I might get with the advance glitch. Discovered later I had screwed the film canister end on tight but the feed lip extention was not in line with the feed slot and it was throwing the canister alignment off and resulted in miss feeds and a mostly ruined roll with double exposures caused by the cog wheels slipping.

Got some more film on order. I'll try this one another day.

Got to looking at it again the other day. Noticed that the mirror would lockup at shutter speeds of
60th of a second and longer. This was more of what I had experienced before and thought I had gotten past. Did some online searching. Got one notion that there was a spring problem and it needed replacing and that no camera repair would want to touch it...or if there was one.... it may cost more to repair than the camera was worth.

So...I fiddled with it some. I found the mirror release was nearly at the bottom of the camera.... easier to get to than the top. Found an opening where I could see the mechanism with various arms moving when taking a picture. I sprayed it with some contact cleaner and worked the shutter speed knob while cocking and firing the camera. And.. after a couple of squirts and some cocking and firing it all loosened up. Just dry, dirty, or sticky parts was the problem. I then put on a few drops of trumpet valve oil.... a kind of light machine oil... and put the base of the camera back on.

I ran a roll of film through the camera today using my not exactly great hand held light meter for suggests of shutter and aperture and managed to get what seems to be consistent results at a wide range of speeds.

But then....on about two thirds of the images I scanned after developing there is this pencil thin line down the middle of the negatives. Have no idea what causes this. The line runs left to right and the cloth shutter runs the same way. Not all the negatives have this same location line. Can't figure it out at the moment.

The problem wasn't in the camera nor the film. The Scanner glass needed a little cleaning.