Don't panic about damage until you know if there really is some.
The shutter mechanism is a bit more sturdy than you have been lead to
believe. You may not have done any damage at all.
The first question is do you see any obvious damage to the shutter?
For example bent or miss aligned shutter blades?
If not does the shutter fire?
If it does then try shooting a test roll of film under different lighting
conditions to see if there are any problems at high or low speeds.
Then examine the negatives for dark bands at the top and bottom of the film and
light leaks.
If you don't find any of these problems then the shutter is probably all right.
If there is obvious physical damage you should probably send the camera to
repair,
however if you feel brave you could try the tests outlined above, examine
the resulting
negatives and if there are no problems shoot with the camera until it stops
working, or
develops exposure problems. At that point it probably won't cost any more
to have it
repaired that it would right now, since the repair shop is most like to
swap out the shutter
anyway. I've seen older ME's who's shutters looked totally miss aligned
that continued to
take acceptable photographs, but that would be up to you.
At 10:06 AM 6/4/2001 -0700, you wrote:
>Hello,
>
>Some of you may have read in another thread of my
>incompetent attempt to shoot a local band (the drummer
>of which is my close friend) in a bar recently. I've
>decided to post another on-topic message soliciting
>advice on how to progress with a problem caused by my
>own idiocy during this ill-fated shoot.
>
>At some point in the evening, when re-loading my
>PZ-1p, I managed to press my thumb directly into the
>shutter curtains. It was hard enough so that I
>actually felt some deflection of the curtains under my
>touch. I cannot begin to tell you the feeling in my
>stomach when I realized what I had done. I am so
>angry with myself, I cannot even describe it. I am
>always so careful not to let even the film leader
>graze these curtains because I understand that they
>are manufactured to such a high precision that they
>may be misaligned and damaged very easily.
>
>My question is what to do next. How much damage am I
>like to have caused? Can this be assessed easily?
>What expense is involved in fixing or replacing this
>part of the camera? Should I send it to Pentax or
>what?
>
>The sad thing is that this was a brand new camera
>(one-month old!) - and now I feel like I will never
>trust it to be working properly unless I have so much
>of the "guts" replaced.
>
>Thanks everyone,
>
>Chaso (rethinking whether he deserves to own a Pentax)
>
>__________________________________________________
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