So I recently came across this tired-looking Praktica Super TL 1000 just discarded in the bottom of a box, and upon getting it out and testing it, surprisingly the shutter worked fine, and the viewfinder was in fairly good condition. Although far from being one of my favourite cameras, I thought it deserved to be tarted up and given a new lease of life, so that's what I did.
Putting it on the workbench, it was in a poor old way and looked like it had led a hard and tiresome life (If cameras could talk, eh?) All but one piece of lonely piece of body leather remained, it was battered and scarred with bits of paint missing everywhere.
So, I took to removing that one lonely piece of body leather and thought to myself, what colour can I do this camera to make it look like it belongs somewhere?
After a bit of thinking and looking through which leather I've got, I ultimately decided on Grey, not only because it looks nice on Silver cameras, but its big cousin my Pentacon Six TL has also been re-leathered in the same Grey.
I cleaned up all of the old glue that was on the body and cut out my first piece of replacement leather.
This part was simple and straightforward as I had the original piece for the template.
For the remaining pieces, this isn't as straightforward as the original pieces were all missing, so they obviously couldn't be used as a template for the replacement pieces, so for the remaining pieces these had to be stuck on and marked to where they needed to be and then cut to the right size and shape by method of trial and error.
Not really a hard job, just quite time-consuming and requiring a steady hand.
Once all of the replacement leather pieces were on, and it started looking like it belonged somewhere, I simply took a Black sharpie, re-blackened some of the scuffed parts that were originally black, and re-blackened the TL-1000 writing.
Once all done, it looked much nicer on the shelf and looked nice next to its big cousin the Pentacon Six TL.
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