Well that was horrendous. Armed with all the necessary bits, bobs and thingumajigs, I spent about three hours yesterday afternoon replacing the light seals on my new Mamiya C330. I mean, I knew it was going to be a rotten job, but for the nominal cost of the replacement foam from Amazon, I’d resolved to tackle it myself, rather than get it done by someone else, at inevitably exorbitant costs.
I’d bought a scalpel too, specifically for the job, as I knew that cutting the strips of foam to the relevant sizes was going to require some precision. I was working with tolerances of mere millimetres.
Although cutting the foam and placing it around the four inside edges of the film door called for almost surgical meticulousness, working in extremely tight and difficult to access places, that wasn’t the worst part. Removing the old seals was the most horrific and soul-destroying aspect of the job, by a country mile. You see, although the old seals had perished and were crumbling by just rubbing them with your finger, the old adhesive was still very much intact. Lighter fluid helped to soften it, but not by much, and essentially I spent the best part of about two hours hunched over my desk like a quasi-Quasimodo, peeling bits of glue away with a pair of tweezers, millimetre by torturous millimetre. Add to that the oppressive miasma of fumes from the lighter fluid that I huffed from with every breath, I’m sure you can imagine the pathetic figure I cut, when it was all over!
Nevertheless, I was very pleased with the finished results. The seals look so much neater now and I’m keeping everything crossed that their integrity is good enough to last for years to come. I bloody hope so anyway, there’s no way I want to do that all over again!