Bronica S2A getting a new leatherette - the full re-skin!

Remember that video I did about glue? One year later I've finally done the S2A re-skin!

By re-skin, I mean removing the old leatherette, the faux leather covering on the camera, and replacing it with a new leatherette.

Anyone who owns a Bronica S2 or Bionic S2A, or any of the others in the series, or any other vintage camera for that matter, will probably have experienced the leather starting to lift off as the glue gets old. Well mine was getting really scruffy. I did a fair bit of touching up, sticking corners down and such like, but I always wanted to fully replace the whole thing.

So, finally, I did it. I got two sheets of a replacement faux leather type material, and began the process.

Getting the glue off the camera was possibly the hardest part, but I went into this knowing that it was going to be tough, because I've done a couple of panels before. So I had a full armoury of solvents ready! As always, I wanted to avoid acetone where possible because it melts literally everything... and after testing a few options I decided to use MEK - methyl ethyl ketone.

Full disclosure - MEK is pretty much just as dangerous for camera parts as acetone! But I was very careful with it, only using cue tips and applying MEK to small areas at a time, making sure it didn't leak and spread into other parts of the camera.

I actually thought the MEK was less destructive than acetone, I don't know if that's chemically accurate or not, but when I've used acetone in the past it seems to strip paint and plastic pretty fast, where as this MEK didn't seem to do any damage to anything. Who knows. Use at your own risk!

Anyway... the camera has a new coat! Let me know what you think of it!

Leatherette was bought from Milly's Cameras, who also sell some really useful bits for general camera repairs and maintenance, you can find them here: https://cameramill.co.uk