…and it goes very well, thanks to the advice I got on a Facebook page. Imagine that!

A few days ago I had the F1 out and put the 85mm f2 lens on it, which isn’t a large telephoto but it’s still a honking big piece of glass, and I noticed some wiggle. It was ever so slightly loose, but not in the lens mount but on one side of the camera body flange. That was worrisome because the wiggle meant the lens wouldn’t be square to the film plane and of course it was going to get worse if I didn’t attend to it. I figured it was just one or more screws loose on the flange, and wondered if it was something I could fix myself because old film camera repair shops are getting scarce, and I’d probably have to ship my camera somewhere, and that particular camera is precious to me. It’s been my companion in the art of photography since I was a teenage boy in high school. 

So I asked on the Facebook Canon F1 page I follow if it was something I could fix myself or did it require taking so much of the body apart to get to that screw I was better off taking it to a camera repair place. I mentioned how precious that camera was to me. I got a reply that it was a super easy fix that just involved removing four philips screws that held the plate around the flange to the body. BUT…I absolutely had to do it with Japan Industrial Standard screwdrivers or I’d strip the heads trying to get them off. I did not know about JIS screwdrivers until that moment. I thought my usual jeweler’s screwdrivers would suffice. But I took the advice and, discovering I didn’t actually have any, bought a small set of JIS screwdrivers.

Much glad I did. The difference is the screws they match to are for screwdrivers that fit deeper into the head, which gives them a much better surface area grip. The screws in question were the tiniest things I’d ever seen, but with the right JIS screwdriver it only took a little torque to get them started and the entire operation went smoothly, once I figured out how to jiggle that front plate off around the flange.

And yeah…the screws holding down the flange were all lose but one. So I tightened those and put everything back together. I’ve never been more grateful for a magnetized screwdriver because I could not have possibly fingered those tiny things back in to get them started.