Repair, Restore, Reimagine

Servicing Analogue Cameras in the Modern Age

By Poras Dhakan / Photography

From left: Vladislav Shenker, Antonio Fragasso (Ausgeknipst)

Most analogue photographers have one or two of these in a drawer somewhere – that almost working camera or accessory that is missing an essential piece but is otherwise in good shape. With replacement parts no longer available in most cases and technicians able to replace them getting harder and harder to find, the hopes of repairing them grew dimmer. Well, that is where the very special people that we had the privilege of meeting come in, our very own analogue photography kintsugi plastic engineers – Vlad and Antonio of Ausgeknipst Vintage Cameras.

Using their qualifications in plastic engineering, these two analogue photography heroes are reviewing parts that break regularly and fixing them so that they are more resilient and perform better than the originals.

Pleading the Case for Plastics

Antonio pointed out during our interview that plastic is truly a wonderful material when used correctly and in a responsible manner. In many cases, plastic parts from cameras perform far better than their metal counterparts and are far more resilient to environmental and repeated stress impact that camera parts have to deal with. However, when some of the plastic cameras were first made, we did not have the knowledge and experience about how the different types of plastics behaved. Therefore engineers designing these cameras often treated the plastic parts like metal ones, when in reality the stress points and material behaviour patterns were completely different.

Ausgeknipst is therefore reviewing camera parts one at a time to understand why certain parts break and how they can engineer them to withstand the stresses that these parts are likely to experience, painstakingly redesigning them to improve them and figuring out the best right materials to use to make long serving replacement parts. The replacements are then printed in their impressively well-organised lab and sent out into the world to bring cherished analogue photography cameras and accessories back to life.

Discussing the problem (from left): Vladislav Shenker (Ausgeknipst), Marwan El Mozayen (SilvergrainClassics) Antonio Fragasso (Ausgeknipst)

Self-Repairs vs the Professionals

Now I know what some of our readers may be thinking. We live in an age where we can 3D scan parts ourselves and easily access 3D prints to print out these parts. There is even a solid online community that shares 3D scans of common parts freely, so that all you need to do is press print. Here is the problem though, we don’t know what we don’t know. Remaking the same part in the same way will inevitably lead to the same problem and therefore is unlikely to be the ideal solution. Nonetheless, we took a broken battery latch from our very own Marwan El Mozayen’s treasured Minolta XM motor and 3D scanned it at home and printed it in a consumer-level printer to see how it would look. We will share the results from this exercise in another article shortly.

We will also share our eye-opening discussion with Vlad and Antonio in our print article on the complications that exist in making resilient replacement parts for our beloved analogue photography tools.

In the meantime, we would love to hear in the comments section about what you have sitting in the drawers that you would like Ausgeknipst Vintage Cameras to work on next!