Dropped a customer's Canon AE-1 on the concrete floor at the Portland repair meetup and now I do this one thing different

Fiona Fox · 2026-10-07T09:55:04.378887+00:00

So I was at the monthly camera repair meetup in Portland about 5 months ago, just a casual thing at a shop on SE Division, and I had a customer's Canon AE-1 on the bench to show a guy how I check the shutter speeds. I picked it up to point at the curtain and my thumb slipped because I had just put down a lens with some oil on it. The body hit the concrete floor from about waist high and the rewind knob bent plus the top plate got a nice dent. I felt sick. That camera belonged to a guy who said it was his dad's and he had already paid me $85 for a CLA. I told him what happened, ate the cost of a parts body to swap the top plate, and spent 2 extra nights getting the rangefinder lined up again. Now I never move a body over bare concrete without setting it on a rubber mat first, even for a second, and I keep a folded towel on the bench at all times. Anyone else had a slip like this, and what ended up saving you from a repeat?

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Dropped a customer's Canon AE-1 on the concrete floor at the Portland repair meetup and now I do this one thing different | Camera Repairers - The Community Guide