The inner innards of the Voigtländer Vito

I was walking through a charity shop a while back, and among a few point and shoots from the 90’s I found this Voigtländer Vito and a couple of other cameras. Nothing of much interest actually, but when asked for the price the oldish lady behind the counter gave me an offer I could not resist. I think I payed 40,- or 50,- NOK for both cameras, which I thought would be worth the price if they worked OK. In fact I actually thought it would be worth it if only one of them worked.
I tested both the shutters and they seemed to work sort of well enough, so off I went with the cameras back home just to put them both on a shelf for some time. 

It's a quite handy little thing after all it is, the Voigtländer Vito. The viewfinder is a real, tiny little one though, but it's quite bright compared to it's extremely small size. 

There you go. It's got a nice little lens and stuff as well, hidden behind the rather large "barn door" in the front. It comes out with a pop and everything in the same time you push the right button. 

Before I went to work five weeks ago I slipped the Vito into my bag. It’s a very handy camera with a barn door type pop-out lens attached to a tiny, cute little bellow, and it has a very nice form factor when folded. There’s the quite common, pancakey 5cm f/3.5 Skopar lens attached to it, on my example it holds a Prontor II shutter, but I know it was delivered with a couple different types through the few years of production. It’s all quite common stuff from back in the days, in other words. From what I have been able to find out from a few sources around the web, it seems like this camera was made just after WWII, some time around 1946/-49.
The film transport seems to be a weak spot on these cameras. They were originally designed for 828 film which was made without sprockets, hence there's no gears inside the thing to transport your film forward the way we're used to. As a result, the rod and gear wheel used to measure frame length is a bit unstable, to say the least. 

See that? The upper rod there acting like a measuring tool to try keep the frames separated and things like that. Well, it fails quite a lot, but I guess that's part of what I payed for. And before you start shouting about the fact I lack the aft lens element; oh yes, I know. It was on the bench for cleaning at the moment, but is re-attached by now. 

Anyway, I loaded a film into it just a couple of days before I went to sea, shot a few holes in the wet, dark and gloomy air back home and then forgot about it for a week or three until I suddenly came to think about it again and then hauled it out to give it a good old test on board the ship. 
It actually worked quite well for about something like three minutes and tree snaps, then suddenly started to act quite weird. Some shots went all good, and some really not. The film transport thing didn’t seem to know when the shutter had been fired at times, which was quite annoying as you probably understand, which in turn resulted in the film winder didn't move a tiny bit after the shutter had been fired and it was about time to wind on to the next frame. 
I didn’t give up though, and after somehting that seemed to be a thousand or so exposures, I finally came to the end of the film and had it developed. Most of the many quadrupple exposures was of course just a mess, but there were about three or four quite nice ones in there among them as well, probably snapped when the camera actually worked, so I thought I would just open the thing up and have a go with some cleaner and grease and see if I could find out where the moose was hidden. 
When I say there was nice exposures you have to take that with a rather large pinch of salt, but I recon you already had figured that out. At least there was something that looked like pictures on the film. 

Isn't it lovely? Huh...? Soft and nothing in focus and all other sorts of great stuff. 

Due to the hickup on the Leica M6 the other day I already had a few tools laying around on top of the table inside my cabin, so I decided this was a fine day to whack open the Voigtländer to see what was going on inside it. 
Well, nothing much to tell the truth. 
A few gear wheels, mostly attached to the frame counter, and a couple of force-transfer plates or rods which seem to have been punched out of post-war tin cans to deal with the shutter and film transport mechanism, and that’s about it. 
Very different to the Leica M6, to put it that way. 

Underneath the gears and the few wheels I found this stuff. Nothing much to jump in joy over, but heck... it seems to be working well enough inside here.

Gears and wheels mounted back in place, ready for new action!

Having a quick look at the mechanism and do a couple of shutter tests with the top cover off, it didn’t take long to determine what the issue might be, and after some further cleaning and a tiny bit of extra polishing at the surface of parts of the release button itself, and of course some lubrication here and there, it seemed we were good to go. The release mechanism is quite open to the elements on this camera, so dirt, rust and old bash had built up in the joints and all over the place. 
They are simple cameras these things, which make them easy to fix as long as important parts are not broken. They are also great fun to use, but not rangefinder-fun mind you! There's the old guesswork to be done for distance you know, which is fine as long as you can se the darn numbers printed on the lens. Tiny little bits they are, the numbers. 
Now I’m looking forward to throw another film inside it one of the next days to see if I can get anything to stick to that one. 
Oh, and I also had the back element of the lens taken off for cleaning when I had it all open anyway, so hopefully I’ll get rid of some of the haze you’ll obviously see on the «on board the ship scans» done with the phone. It was a really dirty lens, I kid you not!
There will of course still be lots of unsharp pictures, luckily!

Here's what I'm talking about... only that I'm probably going to adjust the shutter times even more over to the slow side I guess. Looks like it might be a good camera for those kind of snaps.

I didn’t open the shutter this time though. The shutter times sounds good enough to still go for some time, so no urgent need to spread a hundred small parts and springs around my cabin in a one second timeframe as for yet. 

I'll keep you posted when the next roll has been developed. It might happen one of these days for all we know. 

Looks like I spent the first frame of the film on good old Scot before I left home a while ago. As we all know he don't like cameras too much, but it seems he might not fully understand the basics of the Voigtländer as for yet. That might change though...