Why does nobody talk about how hard it is to fix a stuck shutter curtain on a Nikon F?

I spent 3 hours last Sunday wrestling with a sluggish shutter on my Nikon F. Everyone online just says 'use lighter fluid and exercise it'. Well, I tried that for an hour and it still stuck at 1/500. I finally had to take the whole front plate off, clean the curtain track with Q-tips, and it took another 90 minutes to get it back together. Has anyone else had to go that deep just to fix a simple sticky shutter?

2 comments

2 Comments

jesse8423h ago

Man, I feel your pain on that one. People always make the lighter fluid trick sound like it's some magic fix, but in my experience it's more of a band-aid than a real solution. You usually end up having to go deeper than that, especially if the curtain track has any kind of old gunk built up in there.

tarab548h agoMost Upvoted

Don't you think that gunk is basically what causes half the problems with those tracks?