Toronto Photography Meetup Group

I happened to pick up a cosmetically excellent condition Yashica Minister 700 (Same as the Minister D, but with a f/1.7 lens) for a pretty good deal. The shutter and other mechanicals are fine except the view/rangefinder is way out of alignment and the meter appears broken.

Does anybody have any recommendations for where to get this thing serviced around downtown Toronto?

I did a search here, and it seems that the general consensus is http://www.torontocameraservice.com/ near Liberty Village. I'm going to give these guys a call tomorrow, but thought I'd see if anyone else has experience first and if anyone would know how much the alignment job would cost.

I spent about an hour tonight contemplating a DIY job, but refrained!

On the other hand, do downtown camera or henry's service these things? I paid 30 bucks for it, and so I won't cry if it's a lost cause (well, I'd be disappointed since this appears to be such a rare camera)

good decision if you hope to have this camera working.

The rangefinder mechanism is very difficult to align without proper instructions and tools.

Hehe. Well, I checked with a few places, and it's the same situation all around. The cost of the repair will likely go over $100. I'm too suprised and expected as much.

I don't think it's worth driving the total cost of ownership of this camera that high seeing as how that's how much working ones go for on ebay anyways, and so tonight, I'm going to embark on a mission to dismantle and see what I can do to hopefully get this thing semi useable.

If I come away a hero, I might post pics up. If the camera ends up more broken than it already was, it will be a $30 learning experience.

Check-out http://www.lensinc.net/
they have a bunch of repair manuals and may have one for your camera.

make sure you stock on duct tape and have plenty of WD40. You can fix anything with these.

If it moves and it shouldn't use duct tape.
If it doesn't move and it should use WD40.

So I took the top apart to get access to the inards, and it was the usual case with cameras of this era - gummy, brittle sealing material all over the place. I saw exactly what was wrong with it. The little translucent mirror that merges the rangefinder and the viewfinder image was loose and not seated properly. It appeared to have come unhinged from the glue that held it in place.

I carefully fiddled with it for a while, and decided that what radup70 said was right (the part about it being difficult without tools and know-how, not the duct tape/wd40). I've spent enough time on this already and not enough time taking photos. I can understand why the repair guys charge upwards of $75/hour.

So I closed her up, and can now finally declare this one dead. It'll go up on the shelf as a nice display piece since it is such a good looking piece of work!

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ldam/4407978958/" title="Yashica Minister 700 by PhotoFoo, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2711/4407978958_15ceeb134a.jpg" width="500" height="333" alt="Yashica Minister 700"></a>

Does the F1 work or is it just for display as well.

The f1 works great. Its my main carry-around camera these days because its so compact compared to my gripped 5d2. getting lots of practice developing bw film with it.

The Yashica is really a beaut.

+1 on http://www.torontocameraservice.com/

I have had some service done on my film cameras with them in the past.
I would definitely go with them again.

Rangefinder might not work but scale focusing might?