On Wed, 31 Jan 2001, Chris O'Neill wrote:
> On 31 Jan 2001, at 20:14, Chip Stratton wrote:
>
> > I bought an OM1 which would not fire the flash. I took off the bottom
> > plate, and found a little piece of deteriorated foam had made its way
> > between a little switch down there. After cleaning it off, the flash sync
> > worked perfectly.
Umm, hate to tell you this Chip, but that little bit of foam is supposed to
be there. I believe its purpose is to debounce the contact and prevent
the flash from firing multiple times.
> Wouldn't it be nice if the repair manuals were also available on one or
> more of the online manual archives? Personally, I don't think I'd ever
> attempt a repair, as I'm a real "Tim Allen" when it comes to that kinda
> stuff. But, based on alot of recent messages in the list about fixing
> various minor OM woes, perhaps being able to go online and look stuff
> up in the appropriate repair manual would be helpful?
Hans and I briefly discussed adding the repair manuals to the eSIF. As a
test, I scanned the full OM-2 service manual to see how it would turn out.
Besides being a lot of work, there are a few logistical problems with
electronically distributing the manual. A 150 dpi pdf of the manual
takes 28MB, a rather large file for most people to download. At that
resolution and compression, some of the detailed drawings begin to suffer.
A 300 dpi pdf would fix that, but it produces an 86MB file. To get a good
quality (ie. useful) scan, you need to start with either an original manual
or a first generation copy. Finding such a manual is extremely difficult
these days. Some of the later manuals are still available from Olympus,
but at $50+ each, that quickly becomes expensive. I'll probably pass the
OM-2 pdf off to Hans for inclusion on the eSIF and see how that goes.
A word of warning about the service manuals. They expect you to know what
you are doing! They are not teaching guides. I put them on the same level
as the automotive service manuals that car manufacturers offer. They're
meant to be used by professionals, not hobbyists, and as a result the manuals
are very terse. Olympus added the additional feature that they're written
in Japanese-English, so you sometimes have to guess at what they're trying
to say :-)
-mark
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