Today afternoon I checked the faulty mechanism again. I made a few unsuccessful phone calls this morning to have an expert for the task but in the end I had to take the courage to act myself. My initial thought was that gun oil should do it. The machine was halted for decades, the motor, the springs are 51 years old, probably the original lubricant is the sinner in this case. At least that was what I hoped for.
I recognized that there is a nice metal cover with an interesting pattern to hide the mechanism behind. You can see that on picture nr. 1. If you have sharp eyes you might recognize that the cover is held by 5 screws around the edge of it. You can't take off the cover since the remaining film length measurement system (in middle-top of the picture) and the film forwarding spring (in the middle of the pic Nr. 1) prevent it to be fully taken off. But I thought if only I can move it a little bit, that might be enough to sprinkle gun oil inside the motor itself. I had to be cautious because it is easy to take apart these precise devices with many springs in them, but to piece them back together is another matter.
So I slowly slacked the five screws and pushed off the tiny spring of the forwarding mechanism and in the end I was able to see behind.(see pic nr. 2. and nr. 3) There were two more holes behind it that I couldn't see until now. One was pretty close to the faulty knob so I used oil and later on a straw to clean it as much as I could. Several times I also pulled up the main spring and let the motor run at its max speed, than clean again, then run it again.
The end result was impressing. I managed to piece back everything together and it seems that now the mechanism runs smoother, longer and hopefully without any film jam. I used the remaining broken filmstock for the tests.
I'm really happy tonight. It is good to see such an old item recovering into a better shape especially by my own hands.
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