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I finally found out why the shutter on a customer's AE-1 kept locking up, it was a dead moth
Last Tuesday a guy drops off his dad's old AE-1 at my bench in Dayton. Says the shutter freezes every 20 or so shots and then it clears up if he lets it sit. Classic sign of old lube getting gummy, so I quoted him a CLA and he left it with me.
Pulled the bottom plate, poked around the mirror box, everything seemed fine. Fired it 40 times on the tester and of course it never skipped once. Ran it another 60, still clean. I was starting to think the guy was imagining it.
Went to pull the lens off to check the aperture linkage and a little brown husk falls out of the mirror box onto my mat. A moth. Dried up, wings still kind of attached. Thing must have crawled in through the mount sometime back when the lens was off and made a home for itself, and every so often its body would drift into the shutter path and jam the second curtain for a frame or two.
Blew out the chamber, gave it the CLA anyway since it needed one, called the guy and told him the diagnosis. He laughed for a solid 20 seconds and said his dad never used a body cap, just left it on a shelf with the lens off for a decade.
Anyway the shutter is clean now. Moth got vacuumed up with the rest of the bench trash. What's the weirdest thing you all have fished out of a mirror box? I've had dust, hair, one sunflower seed, but this was a first.
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