"Martin Gregorie"  wrote in message news:q15hon$pi8
> Repairwise, I've an aeromodelling background, so if I'd had your problem
> I probably would have run a drill through the collar and shaft and put a
> small machine screw and Nylock nut through to lock them together. An 8 or
> 10BA screw would do the job.

I did wonder about that, but the shaft is only about 2 mm diameter so it
would be difficult to drill through it without cutting it in half. Grub
screws to bite onto the shaft should be a good way of fastening collar to
shaft in that case.

I did wonder about trying to file a flat onto the shaft for a screw in the
collar to get a better purchase on.

I'm suspicious of any precision mechanical fittings that are plastic rather
than metal. Plastic (the collar was probably nylon) is too inclined to crack
under load or as it gets old.

Still, my admittedly bodged repairs was good enough to scan the photos of my
parents' wedding in time for their 50th wedding anniversary :-)  Getting
good scans from 50-year-old slides, some of which had faded and others of
which were underexposed, was another matter. Slide film was so f-ing slow in
the early 60s that even in good daylight, camera shake was a problem with
some of them. Probably Kodachrome 25 (not even 64), and certainly not
Ektachrome 200 or 400 :-)

As a matter of interest, have you had any success scanning negatives as
opposed to slides? I find I cannot get natural-looking colours. They all
look rather flat and with garish colours, like the coloured "plates"
illustrations that you got in 1930s books. And dark objects against a light
sky (a light object against a dark background on the neg) tend to suffer
from bloom - the light diffuses sideways and giving a halo around the
object. Having said that, there's a *lot* more shadow and highlight detail
that a scan of a negative can reveal, compared with a scan of a print from a
high street shop.

Minolta's software gave better results than VueScan, but it won't
install/run on Win 7, only older version of Windows. VueScan has lots of
presets but none which properly match the edge-markings on the film - mostly
fairly standard Kodacolor print film, so nothing unusual.

Scans of B&W neg film are fine, though I find I get better results scanning
either as a positive and reversing or else scanning as colour neg and then
reducing to B&W. Does VueScan have presets for Ilford FP4 and HP5? I got
fantastic results with the Ilford B&W film that uses colour chemistry,
despite rather dense negatives (overdeveloped?) - sharpness was probably
limited more by the camera lens than the film grain. I got less noticeable
grain from that film at 400 ASA than for FP4 at 100 ASA.

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