Success ! ! !

My winder is functioning again.

Despite cleaning and 'keying' the original terminals as per Liam's excellent suggestion, I still could not get my solder to stick. So, using Liam's clue, I cleaned the front side (larger area) of 2 of the tiny rivets that fix the battery terminals to their fibreglass mount and the solder stuck OK. I bought the new leads through the holes around the original terminals and fixed them to these 2 tinned rivet heads. Voila, eureka, etc.

Now, does anybody have a good cure for eyestrain ?

Thanks for your help in resolving this issue.

Kind regards, Pete Smith.

Liam, thanks for such a rapid response.

These terminals do seem to be stainless (or spring) steel and I think that is the problem. I have cleaned them in as much as I have scaped the solder surfaces with a knife edge but i haven't cleaned them as you have suggested. I'll try that.

I'm wondering whether the flux in my multicore solder is perhaps not correct for steel. The solder I have is for soldering electronic components.

Wire length is not an issue as I am replacing both wires.

I'll try your cleaning method first . . . more later . . . if the winder survives that long.

Thanks, Pete Smith.

Can any of you guys help me with an exasperating problem I have repairing an ME Winder II. I bought it as part of a reasonable lot on eBay ( OK get the laughs out of the way ) The Super-A that I bought with it just needed a good service, which it has had at the hands of Robin @ Harrow Technical, and I now want to get this winder working with it.

The winder has suffered badly from corrosion due to the usual, batteries left in it, to the extent that both the tiny wires connecting the fixed battery terminals to the circuit board underneath have corroded, and dropped off as soon as I looked at them.

My dilemma is that I can't get any solder to 'stick' to these terminals. No matter what I try, I either have the wrong solder (60/40 lead/tin multicore) or I'm not getting the terminals hot enough. I can't even get a reasonable mechanical joint as there is not much of the terminal to wrap wires around. It was a surprise to me that there are no holes in the tags to take the wires.

Advice from anybody who has succesfully repaired these terminal connections would be gratefully received.

Thanks in advance, Pete Smith.

George,

Maybe this is more your kind of thing

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Pentax-MX-Silver-colour-Camera-Papermodel_W0QQitemZ8258687...

Enjoy, and don't cut yourself with those sharp scissors

Pentax don't make a grip for the DS but http://www.dicain.com/2002/zb/view.php?id=notice&no=61 seems to.

Ken, if you think the DS is small, have a play with the Canon 350D (Digital Rebel XT in US), its even smaller.

I'm thinking about producing the same kind of thing, a dual flash macro set up.

I've been looking for a couple of AF240FT's to do the job but I can't find any at the moment.

The 2 X AF500FTZ idea sounds very good but isn't that a bit overkill (too much light) for a flash to subject distance of only a foot or two at most. Would two lower powered guns be more controllable?

Would it matter if the two guns were of different output power, one 500FTZ and one 360FGZ for instance ? I'm thinking now that possibly the inbuilt flash could be setup as a wireless controller to trigger the 360FGZ and the 500FTZ will hopefully be triggered correctly by the 5P cable connection.

My fear is that the subject will not be evenly lit from both sides because of the different output levels from the 2 guns..

Hmmmm, worth an experiment I think. Sadly, it won't be for about a month because my 500FTZ and my 360FGZ are currently about 2000 miles apart but I'll get them together in the next couple of weeks and let you know how I get on.

Why not just go for one or two of the excellent Pentax AF zoom's available, they'll work well with your Super Program. After all, now that you've graduated to 'K' mount, you'll move up to Autofocus soon enough, and then . . . who knows, maybe even digital. Nah, probably not.

My own Super A (European version of the Super Program) which I bought in 1983/84 has had a Takumar-A 70-210mm lens on it for most of its life. I couldn't afford a 'proper' Pentax zoom lens when I bought the camera but I have been well pleased with the results over the years.

You might also check your 'sharpness' setting on the first menu screen. If you are saving your images in JPEG or TIFF Format, this setting will affect the overall sharpness of the resulting image. You may still have to sharpen even more within your chosen photo editing package to achieve that 'pin' sharp look.

I think I'm right in saying that the sharpness control has no effect if you are saving in RAW format, but check the manual on that one.

For my humble requirements I found Raw Shooter Essentials to be superior in its pre-conversion manipulation capabilities to the RAW converter that Adobe provide for Photoshop-CS. I have no experience of the CS2 variant. I now use the premium version of Raw Shooter Essentials but the free version is more than adequate for most things. You can download it from www.pixmantec.com and they also host a useful forum. After I've tweaked my pic, I squirt it into PS-CS and have used Matt-Matics Sharpen-O-Matic action with excellent results (Thanks MM).

Possibly a better recommendation would be to replace your PC if it is not capable of running CS2. Good quality, fast, & reliable computer hardware is dirt cheap at the moment.

I have found that my AF280T and *ist D combination produces over-exposed results. My AF500FTZ on the other hand tends to produce under-exposed pics. My AF360FGZ works flawlwssly. I think the over-exposure problem from the older guns is due to their analogue command interface (the clever bit that enables camera and flash to 'talk' to each other). The later guns use a digital command interface.

Regards, Peter Smith.