[Leica] Shutter speed problems on R7: strange new events

[Martin Howard <howard.390@osu.edu>]

So, I was playing around with my R7 trying to see if I could figure out a
way of opening it to get at the contacts to clean them.  I remembered
talking to Tom about this at some point, and he suggested that it might be
low battery voltage.  It sounded very strange to me and I forgot about it,
but I took the motor drive off, opened the battery compartment in the camera
and shuffled the four little 1.5V silver batteries around.  Lo and behold,
the damn thing started working perfectly.  So, I put the motor back on, play
with it a little more and suddenly notice the times are all off again.  I
was about to replace the batteries, when I noticed that after removing the
motor drive the second time, the times were correct again.

Hmm.  A quick dash to my local supermarket and 10 fresh AA batteries later,
I reattached the motor drive and it now appears to work perfectly.

Has anyone else ever noticed anything like this?  Low voltage in the motor
drive battery pack affecting the camera's ability to read the shutter speed
dial?  (I didn't even think that the camera drew power from the MD BP)

This is the most bizarre manifestation of low-battery voltage I've ever come
across.

M.

- -- 
Martin Howard                 | "We can't make mistakes like that on our
Visiting Scholar, CSEL, OSU   |  own. We need computers to help us."
email: howard.390@osu.edu     |     -- A pharmacologist on computerization
www: http://mvhoward.i.am/    +-------------------------------------------