Fixing a detached rewind lever on a Petri Color 35

I took my Petri Color 35 out with me the other day. It’s small enough to fit in in the pocket of my jeans, so I’d just taken it out on a whim when I took the dogs for a walk. As I was walking down the road with my hand in my pocket I was absent-mindedly playing with the rewind lever. Unfortunately – as can be seen above – in my unnecessary tinkering, it somehow wiggled lose and fell off. Since it wasn’t immediately obvious how to fix it, I thought I’d document the process.

My Guide to fixing a detached rewind lever on a Petri Color 35

First step is to open the back of the camera. The part of the camera that I shall call the “rewind lever surround” needs to be removed. It unscrews quite easily but the two little prongs that slot into the film need to be prevented from rotating to unscrew it. To do this I poked a thin screwdriver between the prongs. I then used a chisel (because I didn’t have a big enough flat head screwdriver) to unscrew it.

Be careful when removing the rewind lever surround as there’s a tiny nut inside it. This nut is what holds the rewind level in place.

With a bit of fiddling the bolt can be threaded onto the rewind lever inside the surround. Once it is threaded slightly, I found it could be tightened using a very small flat headed screw driver. It is a bit of a fiddle to do it, but despite there being no way to grip the other end of the bolt, the nut can be tightened this way quite satisfactorily. (excuse the rubbish picture, it’s a crop of an iPhone photo)

Once in place the lever and surround can be easily screwed back into place.

I shall be making sure I don’t fiddle around with it in my pocket again in future…! Though, if it does come unscrewed again, I might be tempted to add a tiny drop of super glue. For now I’m happy enough.

Hope that helps anyone else who suffers this minor break down

Cheers

Hamish

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