My disappointment was palpable, though not unexpected, when I turned the camera on for the first time and heard the terrible sound of the shutter scraping against the innards of the camera. The journey now returned to taking the camera apart again, and removing the camera from the rackover cradle so I could get to the shutter. The shutter assembly in the Fox camera is an extremely delicate and complex piece of engineering. It is made up of a carrier plate, a clutch plate, two very thin shutter blades, a spring steel slip plate, and a couple of spring detents that define the variable shutter angles.
The shutter blades themselves are held to the two hubs by two sets of 8 precision ground pins that fit into holes punched in the shutter blades. One of the two hubs carries the focal plane shutter. The other hub carries the variable shutter. Once I had taken everything apart again, I discovered that, as expected, the lead counterweights that are molded into the hubs had oxidized and expanded, causing the hubs to swell and be pushed against the casting in several places. Between the two clutch plates is a spring steel slip plate that is meant to allow the plates to rotate on center to one another so the shutter angle can be varied. This slip plate had oxidized and seized the two plates together. It took me two days to carefully sand oxidation off the affected areas and re-black all the sanded surfaces before I could put the shutter assembly back together and reinstall it in the camera. It sounds quiet now after being partially reassembled and run with a drill motor, but there is no way to tell for absolute certain until I put the camera back together and put the motor back on it. Wish me luck.
