"Deforming" a Kiev-60?

[mabman]

Idle question, any idea how much force it takes to "deform" a Kiev-60 (not mangled, but enough that a repair guy would say "it's deformed, but fixable")?

I ask because I bought a used Kiev-60 (relabeled as "ARAX") not too long ago from eBay, and, caveat emptor, was told it was fully working. It had frame-spacing issues, and had the old-style prism where it's hard to fit modern batteries, so I sent it off to ARAX in the Ukraine to get fully working.

His shipping instructions were to send it the slow way to avoid taxes, etc.

I got an email today saying it arrived (about a month later), but my packing job was poor and the camera was "deformed", requiring additional repair. I'm going to go ahead with it, but it sounds an awful lot like the Ukrainian Post guys played football with it.

So, just curious if someone else has experienced this, and for future reference, what exactly do I have to pack it in to avoid these issues in the future? The Kiev-60 is a pretty heavy camera, I would think it would take some effort to do it damage like that.

[Nick Zentena]

Off topic but between shipping both ways and the repairs wouldn't it have been better to have ordered a body from Arax to begin with?

Kievs aren't the hardest to adjust framing spacing on. Used to be a few webpages on it.

Wrapped it in bubble wrap. Stick that in a stiff box with some styrofoam peanuts. Box needs to be a bit bigger then you'd think.

[mabman]

Well, mine came with the Vega-28B 120mm lens, and the lens itself works just fine, so I'm still ahead even with the repair vs. buying new from ARAX with equivalent lens

Maybe I just didn't use enough bubble wrap...

[Greg_E]

Keep the boxes they return it in. Anything of value I wrap up in some sort of foam or bubbles and put in a box. Then pack more packing around that box inside a bigger box. This prevents at lot of the UPS football team from damaging it. Mostly I try to ship everything in the USA as Priority mail because they seem to take better care of the parcels. But UPS must always be in two boxes with packing between the boxes.

[srs5694]

FWIW, here are instructions on calibrating Kiev 60s in various ways. This page enabled me to rescue a Kiev 6C that badly overlapped frames and that had a shutter speed that was so far off it was unusable as delivered. It's now working fine. I used these instructions for using a TV as a shutter speed tester. The method is a bit imprecise, but I'm getting good enough exposures now, at least on print film.

[2F/2F]

This sounds like a case of B.S. to me. Was your packing job actually poor? I would just forget it and make an insurance claim. If you didn't get insurance, just cut your losses. It's an $80 camera. It cannot possibly be worth shipping it from Canada to Ukraine for any imaginable reason. If anywhere, try Kiev USA.