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Reading an old repair ledger from 1987 vs my current bench notes
I found a leather-bound repair ledger from a shop that closed in Sacramento back in 1987, and the contrast with my laptop notes is night and day. Back then, each entry had the customer's face described, the camera's serial number, the exact screw torque used on the top plate, and a sketch of where every shim went. My current notes are just a few typed lines and a photo if I remember to take one. The old ledger had a note from a tech saying "customer cried when I fixed her Spotmatic, charged her $12 and threw in a lens cap." What really struck me is how much hand knowledge is just gone now, that tech's handwriting shows he fixed the same shutter jam 40 times and each time wrote down a slightly different tweak. I spent the whole afternoon copying some of his methods into my own binder, and it saved me on a Minolta X-700 that was missing 2 gears. Do any of you keep paper logs still, or is everyone fully digital these days?
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jamie_taylor11d ago
Old techs wrote down the stuff that actually matters, and that $12 note says it all.
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