This is my other toy, another Olympus but this time the OM2n model. The one i have is in near perfect condition, with hardly any wear on the body at all. I doubt it has been used much in its life time so far, but that’s about to change!
Eventhough it was in such good condition, the batteries and light seals needed to be replaced. So i ordered some new silver oxide batteries (no the alkaline type), and then started my search for some new light seals. I stumbled on the kits made by Jon Goodman and ordered one after reading so many good reports. The light seal kit came today, so i really wanted to get started on it. This is what i did :

Below you will see a couple of pics of the old light seals. They have deteriorated quite a bit over time, and have just turned into black sticky muck basically.

The first step was to remove the remaining old seals. This was done using solvent and this nifty little bamboo stick that came with the light seal kit. It didn’t come out as easy as i thought, and took quite alot of time to scrape it all out. Next time i’ll use a more powerful solvent, the only one i had was some crappy biodegradable/environmentally friendly variety. Which just means its weak shit.

Next, i had to put the new foam light seals in. First i put in new rail slot on the back. Then a nice new fabric hinge seal. Both were pretty simple to do.

After that i had to move onto the hard bit, the mirror damper. This was actually really tricky for a couple of reasons. First of all, the area is physically quite hard to get to, and it was hard to get any light in there to see what you were doing (i should of done it during the day with some natural light). The other difficult part was actually cutting the foam to size. Adhesive backed foam cut at 2mm wide doesn’t want to keep its shape, and its easy to not get a bad cut. Using a Stanley Knife i managed to get it first go, but there has to be a better way of doing it. Below you can see one of the two “L” shaped pieces of foam i had to cut. It looks alot easier than it was!

After the mirror damper i was finished, and now have a camera with fresh light seals. The next step is the real fun bit, taking photos. I’ll find out if my light seals work, haha.