One customer's dead camera turned into a long talk about film shops

Last month a guy came into my shop with a Canon AE-1 that wouldn't wind the film forward. I opened up the back and saw the take-up spool was just spinning free, classic gear slip. He said he'd been carrying it around for 15 years since his dad gave it to him, never got it serviced. I showed him the broken plastic gear teeth right there on the bench, and he just went quiet for a minute. Then he told me his dad used to work at a drugstore photo counter back in the 80s and would fix these same cameras on his lunch break. We ended up talking for almost an hour about how those old shops trained real repair people, not just parts swappers. I fixed the gear with a metal replacement I had in a drawer full of salvaged parts, cost him about 40 bucks total. Has anyone else had a repair turn into a history lesson from a stranger like that?

1 comments

1 Comment

corap6113d ago

Nostalgia's fine, but those old shops churned out more hacks than heroes. A metal gear swap is just good sense, not proof the past was better.