I'd be more worried about the recoil with the camera gun - even .22 could give you a bloody nose if it was intended to be fired as though the shooter was taking a photo!

Something I've recently tried (successfully) for clearing a jammed camera:

Remove the baseplate

Dribble a little lighter fuel into the mechanism that is revealed (at the base of the film take-up spool)

Prod the various moving parts gently with a screwdriver, sooner or later one will move and the camera will unjam

In the case of my recently-acquired ME this returned it to working order, albeit with a non-functioning frame counter. Bear in mind that lighter fuel is very flammable and shouldn't be used in confined spaces!

I've just had a nose around Ebay.it, and sure enough there are a fair number of ME Supers with the same disc and no printing on it. Looks like someone may have bought themselves a new ME while on holiday in Italy!

I've had another look at the frame counter with the service manual, but still can't seem to get it right. I'm not keen to take too much apart as at the moment I have a working ME which doesn't count how many photos you've taken, I'd rather that than a pile of parts that used to be a working ME...

Thanks for that - I didn't realise the frame counter scale could be removed from the large gearwheel underneath it, that should make it much easier to get everything meshing properly again. I can see how it's supposed to work but couldn't get everything properly aligned.

Interesting - I can't see any sign at all of the printing though, not even faintly. The rest of the camera isn't bad at all, only a bit of scuffing/scratching so I'd be amazed if the lettering had worn off that easily. Maybe some of the cameras didn't make it to Italy and were sold in the UK with the disk but without the lettering?

I have checked ebay for one of the ME belt clips but the only two listed are both black, so keeping eyes open for a chrome one. Something a bit unusual for the collection, given I paid so little for what seems to be a mostly-functional camera!

Mine's the plain SFX rather than the n model, and I still haven't finished the film. Thing is, with film (especially slide) I tend to wait for a definite occasion to use it rather than just taking the camera with me in case anything interesting turns up, as I do with the K-m. So far on that roll I have a few landscapes and some shots of garden birds, I'll be interested to see how the latter come out as I was using the big 100-300mm zoom hand held and obviously you don't get SR on film!

I recently bought an ME for £8 on ebay, sold as "jammed". I managed to get it working with a squirt of lighter fuel and some careful prodding, then settled down to clean the exterior:

[IMG]http://i183.photobucket.com/albums/x21/Kingofthemountains/IMGP2259.jpg[/IMG]

In doing so I noticed something a bit odd - that chrome circle to the right of the lens mount. The "leather" covering seems to be cut to fit around it and it definitely isn't a sticker, so does anyone know what it was intended for? I don't think it's a normal ME thing. The camera has what I'd guess to be a fairly low serial number - 1237001.

The frame counter doesn't work, presumably as some wally forced the film advance lever before I got hold of it. Does anyone have a strip and rebuild guide for this section? The only one I could find blithely said "you shouldn't need to fiddle with the frame counter unless someone has forced a jammed camera" but didn't explain what you should do if someone has done so! Even if I haven't got my hands on something rare I'd still like to get it fully functional as it isn't in bad cosmetic condition.

I think the rot set in when they stopped stocking used gear. At that point their staff no longer needed to really understand photography, and they changed from being a camera shop to being an electronics retailer who sell cameras.

Mind you, when I see the prices in local independent camera shops compared to ebay I'm not surprised that Jessops got out of that side of the business. The fact that people can now buy and sell gear directly without a dealer getting involved and needing to add their own markup must have done serious damage to shops.

Interesting...because they will take Panasonics in for repair! My brother sent his Lumix bridge camera in to Jessops when the zoom in button ceased to function. The servicing people they use seemed pretty good, as it came back in full working order.

I was picking it up when the above exchange occurred

The Dimitrov site lists two variants of the M 50mm f2 (and they do both exist, I have both). The earlier ones have a metal aperture ring, while the later ones have a plastic aperture ring and a linear aperture lever amongst other minor details. It seems as if Pentax wanted to make a final batch of M 50mm f2s so they adapted some parts from the A version, hence the plastic aperture ring (nothing like as nice to use as the metal one) and linear aperture.

If you come across one of the later ones don't use it as a parts donor, they seem a little more unusual. I've only seen one which I bought cheaply because the aperture ring didn't work too well, I managed to fix that and it's now on an MG (presumably the right age, as the MG was their final pre-A series body).