Polaroid SX-70 Sonar OneStep (#2)

DOB: July 10, 1978

 

I passed-up this one at a thrift store the same day the other one came in the mail because it, too, was acting broken when I brought an empty film pack to test it with. After sending back the eBay camera, I figured I'd at least experiment with it - so on Friday I went back and bought it, and a pack of 600 film that had come in since the previous week.

 

Like the eBay camera, this one was stuck mid-cycle - in that it would immediately close the shutter upon closing the film door, but not cycle the motor for the taking mirror and rollers that would normally eject the darkslide. To correct this, I carefully pried-off the plastic cover over the gear train (surrounding the yellow film-door release lever), and gently rotated the gears manually to cycle the mirror and rollers through their operation. Once I was able to get it back to the "home" position, I re-loaded the camera with the empty film pack and it hesitantly came back to life! I imagine the camera had been idle for many, many years - as its operation was very sluggish the first few times I hit the shutter button - but the camera portion soon was operating as smooth as my other two SX-70's!

 

Then the autofocus began acting weird, like it was getting stuck... from there I went into full "surgeon-mode"; I removed the entire front cover for the shutter mechanism and sonar receptor, which interestingly just snaps-on, and began cleaning whatever gears and contacts I could reach. Another interesting thing about the innards of these cameras is that the shutter button is not mechanical, unlike its successors, but rather contact-driven. There are three metal spring-loaded contacts that stick out behind the orange shutter button. When the first two are made by pressing the button halfway, the autofocus is activated (when engaged via the black lever above the manual focusing wheel), and when all three contacts are made the camera fires.

 

After all was said and done, I loaded-up the empty film pack, and it instantaneously returned to life! I tested the system numerous times by jumping the contacts with a screwdriver and everything worked great! From there it was a matter of snapping everything back together, and scrubbing the camera real good with some of my car detailing stuff: Meguiars detailer on the silver, and Nu-Vinyl on the leather which worked wonders! This camera was looking pretty ratty when I first examined it, and now it looks almost like-new!

Done