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Skip the ultrasonic cleaner on old leaf shutters, I cooked a Retina for $60
I know the ultrasonic cleaner is the go-to answer for everything on this forum, but I'm going to say it straight: don't dunk a 1950s leaf shutter in one. I picked up a Kodak Retina IIa at a flea market in Fort Wayne for $60 and the slow speeds were sticky, so I ran the whole shutter assembly in a cheap 40kHz cleaner for two 3 minute cycles with some jewelry solution. That was a $60 mistake. The cleaner stripped the thin lube off the pivots and flushed gunk into places I couldn't see, and the shutter went from sticky at 1/2 to completely frozen at 1/4 and slower. Took me two evenings with naphtha and a tiny brush to get it working again, and the blades still show etching that wasn't there before. The old timers I talk to keep saying clean it dry first and only flush the specific pivot points, not the whole unit, and I should have listened. So what's your go-to for sticky slow speeds on these old shutters, do you flush selective or just send it out?
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