Is there life after aperture block failure?

peterpainter wrote:

drummercam wrote:

peterpainter wrote:

working reasonably well using the battery insert and AA batteries.

You're saying the AA battery voltage (apparently) is strong enough to overcome the failure? That would be interesting to know. I fixed my K-S2 myself with the "plunger filing" method. Until that, I had contented myself with using only the 55-300mm RE, which doesn't use the body for aperture control. But I decided to pull the body apart and give it a try, and it was not too hard, and it worked. I've now taken more post-fail frames than I had taken prior to the failure.

Yes. I've only tried standard alkaline batteries, not rechargables, so I don't know about them. It isn't a perfect fix - having used the camera for a while say in the morning, later in the day it will still give a few dark frames to start off with after being out of use for even for an hour or so. I've used Duracell and Varta so far and they seem fine.

It's not really a 'nice' answer to the problem but with the current Covid-19 I'm not getting out much so not doing a lot of photography. When (if) things get back to normal I may reconsider because getting the adapter in is fiddly but more importantly shooting past the dark frames is a pain at times which means it isn't just 'turn the camera on and shoot!' Anyway, rumour has it that eventually this will cease to work.

Sorry, that wasn't very clear.  As above, but in addition note that when turning the camera on I usually (unless it has been used quite recently) have to run it for a few shots at fast burst mode to get clear of the underexposed frames.