Agfa Billy: Recalibrate focus scale?

Berferd · 2011-07-25T15:00:57+00:00

Hallo Leute, habe vor einiger Zeit eine auf ebay ersteigerte Agfa Billy generalüberholt (Shutter klemmte, Linsen waren verschmutzt und hatten leichten Pilz...

Berferd

Hi everyone, A while back, I bought an Agfa Billy on eBay and gave it a complete overhaul (the shutter was sticking, the lenses were dirty and had a bit of mould on them, etc.) – now it’s practically as good as new again. I know it’s not a great camera, but I’m quite fond of these old things. Unfortunately, I’d relied on a tip I found online saying that once you’ve unscrewed the focus group, you can easily readjust the focus by sticking a bit of Scotch tape in place of the film, so I hadn’t marked the position on the scale. What a blunder... the Scotch tape method doesn’t work at all, unfortunately; it’s far too imprecise to determine the sharpness, even with a Siemens star. I wasted a test film on a series of shots for sharpness: completely off the mark. Luckily, I had objects in the frame whose distances I knew, so I was able to make a rough correction to the scale. It’s better now, but unfortunately still well off the mark, as I discovered with the second roll of film. Has anyone ever successfully calibrated a scale like this? How did you go about it? Is there perhaps someone in the Nuremberg area who could take a look at my camera? Berferd.

Wolf_XL

...why not give the collimator method a go! I’ve described how to do it on pages 7 onwards... In the PDF, I’ve only done this for the ‘infinity’ setting – if that’s correct, the markings on the distance ring are usually correct too. If there are no markings left there, you can of course use this method to set the markings for other distances as well.

Berferd

Great, thanks Wolf! I’ll give it a go this weekend. I hope I can get the hair taut enough.

cfb_de

Great, thanks Wolf! I’ll give it a go this weekend. I hope I can get the hair taut enough.

And if you want to restore the camera to its original state with slightly lower sharpness, you can make a very effective focusing screen from a CD cover using fine-grit sandpaper. Best regards, Franz

Robin_

I’ve got another question as well. I’ve now got an Agfa Billy jgestar f 8.8. I wanted to clean the lenses because they had a slight fungal growth on them. I’ve done that now. My problem, however, is that I’m no longer sure which way round the lenses are arranged. In other words, I know which lens goes where, just not which way round I should turn them. Can anyone help me with this? Thanks :) Regards, Robin

Robin_

That's sorted :)