I finally got round to fixing the second RE, and properly this time. The lens had some oil in the aperture blades, so I needed to partially dismantle it and carefully clean out the blades with lighter fluid. Also, the meter reading was off. After removing the left side cover I noticed that, probably because of the previous owner’s ill-advised attempt to adjust the meter to work with a LR44 (a wrong type of battery for this camera), the red lacquer seal on top of the meter had been broken; fortunately the actual, correct adjustment resistors at the bottom of the camera hadn’t, apparently, been touched. The meter needed just a slight adjustment; I checked the reading with a grey card, comparing the result with the readings of other – both analog and digital – cameras.
I’m using the MR-44 adapter from Small Battery Company to power the RE’s exposure meter – the best possible, although not very cheap, substitute for the original PX675 mercury battery.
The first RE, which started this series of posts, has already been permanently demoted to a parts donor camera, so this post concludes the “Repairing the RE”-series.
