Voigtlander Vito BL repair fail and GAS-fired workaround

Lee Miller could completely strip down her Rolleiflex ‘to the last nut and bolt’ and reassemble it in the dark ‘in some crummy billet’, according to her son, Antony Penrose. This historical snippet greatly impresses me, as having done a bit of repair work myself, I am acutely aware of the level of difficulty of what she was doing. I pride myself on having repaired quite a bit of camera gear over the last few years, but most of my repairs have been relatively simple jobs on old gear, with no electronics. I’ve disassembled a few lenses to clean fungus and haze from the elements, have done fairly simple CLRs on some old camera bodies, and recently repaired a broken parallax adjustment mechanism on the viewfinder for a Fujinon W 65mm F5.6 lens with a recycled spring (supplied by my partner, the all-time champion of thriftiness), a piece of sardine tin lid and some super glue. But shutters, even mid- 20th century ones, are pretty intimidating and I have thus far stayed away from modern gear with lots of circuitry.

So, having already reviewed cameras used by my Dad and my Grandfather for this blog, I really wanted to review my Mum’s Voigtlander Vito BL too. She used it in Australia and the Solomon Islands in the late 50s and early 60s until it was submerged in saltwater, having been loaded into a canoe that got swamped. Salt water is the last thing you want inundating the intricate innards of your camera – corrosion sets in pretty quickly if everything isn’t thoroughly washed in fresh water and relubricated promptly (which did not happen at the time). Amazingly the camera (the one in the centre of the feature image) didn’t look in particularly bad shape when I got it, and the glass in the lovely Color-Skopar 50mm lens looked pretty clean, so I contemplated stripping it down and seeing if a light application of rust treatment solution followed by careful relubrication might get things working again. My primary problem was that the metal ring around the front of the lens had been dented inward, preventing me from removing the lens elements (in order to access the front side of the shutter) without buying a rather expensive tool to straighten out the dent without destroying the thread.

So I gave up. But I was still so intrigued by what I had read about this camera (plus my Mum’s assertion that it was the best camera she ever owned) that I couldn’t resist having a look at the market price of a working condition specimen online. To my surprise, not only were they mostly pretty cheap, but I spotted a mint condition Vitomatic IIa, which is essentially identical to the Vito BL, but also has a range-finder, for a lower price than any of the Vito BLs that were on sale. So I bought that.

While perusing the various Vito and Vitomatic cameras for sale, I also spied a cheap Vito II, which is an earlier, much smaller and simpler, folding Voigtlander, with a front cell focussing F3.5 50mm Color-Skopar lens in a Prontor-S shutter, but no range-finder. It was so cute I bought it as well.

So ends my shameful (actually shameless) tale of massively wimping out of the nobler option of repair, and instead opting for the ignoble alternative of consumerism. But in the end I have been able to test both cameras for myself and see what they are capable of, which is quite a lot. However by way of shortcomings, the Vitomatic’s rangefinder patch was not visible at all until I removed the top plate and light meter and, with some difficulty, cleaned the glass behind the rangefinder window, which was quite grimy. This is a common issue with these cameras. On the Vito II, shutter speeds between 1 an 1/10 don’t work (probably explains the low price), and for the moment I’m happy to put up with that. The viewfinder of the Vito II is also quite small and squinty compared to the huge and bright viewfinders of the bigger, non-folding Vitos and Vitomatics.

So below I first provide three images made by my Mum with her Vito BL back in the ‘60s, followed by ten images I have made with the Vitomatic IIa, and the Vito II. The Color-Skopar lenses are excellent. Received wisdom appears to be that front cell focussing Tessars are not quite as sharp as unit focussing versions, and that may be the case with the Vito II’s lens, but I have only shot colour print film with it so far, so I can’t be too sure.

Mum’s images made with the (as yet unrepaired) Voigtlander Vito BL:

The following images were all made by me on the unceded lands of the Bindal and Wulgurukaba peoples.

Thanks for reading.

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