Repairing & Revisiting a Voigtländer Vito CL – Here there be Dragons – By Has Gustafsson

“Here there be Dragons” – a text said to be found at the very edge of maps a long time ago when the world was still not explored. Said text, I guess, was to discourage seafaring explorers, and land-based alike, not to venture into the unknown, or at least be wary. However I suspect that it actually pushed them to do just that…

The old warning came to my mind when I decided to repair my dads old Voigtländer Vito CL. A comment on my “Voigtländer Vito CL – The Dad Cam” article made me feel that I had to get it working again, be there dragons or not.

A bit of working the internet turned up an old repair manual with some beautiful handmade isometric drawings which at a first glance had dragons all over. A wee dram, a couple of cups of Earl Grey (not at the same time though) and some frowning later the dragons turned out to be the cutest little kittens. All that was needed was two flat head screwdrivers, a couple of tweezers, some careful dismantling and meticulous sorting of the parts removed.

There were two problems to sort; the lens, or rather the shutter assembly, had some heavy play where it attaches to the mounting plate and the focus needed adjusting. None of the two turned out to be particularly difficult to fix. It took me about two hours from start to end. Disassembling the camera and tighten the lockring for the shutter assembly was very straightforward, the infinity focus adjustment took some reading to understand but once I had my head around it, it was sorted in 10 minutes.

I have to say that now that its back to working order it is a real joy to use. The hard part is guesstimating the focus distance. For wider shots stopped down, it’s no problem but close focusing fully open is a totally different story. It’ll take a great deal of  practice or a tape measure to get it right.

The light meter is what really amazed me. It is just so good. I threw some really tough scenes at it, see the images below, and it just nailed it. Every frame on the roll, except where I messed up myself, was perfectly exposed. I saw a glimpse of it, and wrote about it in the first article, when I tested the shutter speeds and they were all exposed exactly the same. I never imagined this though.

To sum it up; I will be using this gem on a daily basis from now on. The small size and ease of use makes for a perfect day-to-day camera. I feels really good to be able to continue using the same camera my dad used.

If you want to see the dipper image I was editing, it’s here on Instagram or here on Vero.
I shot the test images on Ilford HP5+, developed in Fomadon R09 1+25, scanned with Plustek 8200i.
Little or no editing after scanning.

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or http://www.hassegustafsson.se (In Swedish only)