This is just another attempt to make up for the dreadful design of this camera. I'll try to take a picture of this when time permits, but it's easy to describe.

You know those round gears with the tiny screws that you remove to adjust the lenses? They can wobble a bit when the shutter fires and blur the image. A thin rubber band stretched out so that it goes between those gears and the shutter housing will fix this.

Jim Harp

The lenses are mounted in barrels that have a worm gear
around them. As the gears attached to them with the little
screws are turned the lens barrels are screwed in or out
adjusting focus. It would be imposable to have the worm
gears thread into their groves without some wobble if left
dry so they put a heavy grease on them to give them some
friction to keep them where you put them and not wobble in
place. Over the years, the grease dries out and becomes
hard. Turning the focus rings then breaks up the hard
grease and after a while the barrels become loose. The
action of the shutters opening will cause vibration and
cause the image to smear as the lenses vibrate.

I guess you can put a rubber band around them to dampen
vibration; I have not tried that. I found that I could
remove the lens barrels, clean off the old grease and put
some fresh grease in the groves. The fresh grease does not
have to be anything special as it is never worked heavily
and never at high temperature. I used automotive wheel
bearing grease and it has worked fine for the 4 Sputs I have
done this to. A good time to do the grease change is when
you are adjusting to match focus as you will have the gears
off the barrels then and they will screw out easily. The
old grease was good for 20 or 30 years so I figure the new
grease will out last several rubber bands.

Chuck Holzner

----- Original Message -----
From: "jamesbharp" <jamesbharp@verizon.net>
To: <MF3D-group@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, July 29, 2010 12:16 PM
Subject: [MF3D-group] Dampening Sputnik vibrations


This is just another attempt to make up for the dreadful
design of this camera. I'll try to take a picture of this
when time permits, but it's easy to describe.

You know those round gears with the tiny screws that you
remove to adjust the lenses? They can wobble a bit when the
shutter fires and blur the image. A thin rubber band
stretched out so that it goes between those gears and the
shutter housing will fix this.

Jim Harp