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2026-04-12 Nikon EM Shutter Repair

This is not going to be one of those exhaustive “this is how you fix” articles. It is more like a “fixing things can be fun and rewarding, even if you don’t know quite what worked,” article.

(This is the EM body after it was fixed) I was very surprised to find a Nikon EM body in a discount bin.  Then I noticed three things—
  1. the camera’s mirror was up, so the shutter was visible from the front
  2. the shutter was all crinkled up
  3. the battery cover was missing
    Seems the camera had a jammed shutter so the camera store owner had stripped the battery cover from the body—he tucked the cover away in case he needed to replace one— and had then thrown the body into the discount bin.
    Since I hoped I might be able to unjam the shutter the owner gave me the battery cover as well. There is little point—if I did get the shutter working—not to be able to test the shutter out using the Auto setting. And to get the Auto to work, I needed the battery cover.
As an aside the EM camera’s metal shutter has three manual settings that don’t require a battery. You can manually set—
  • B the shutter stay open as long as the shutter release is held down
  • M90 Sync speed so works fine with flash and as a all-purpose shutter speed
  • Auto without a battery the shutter fires at 1000 sec
    Metal shutters in particular need to be completely cocked in one motion. From the looks of the shutter something had interrupted the cocking and the one blind had rammed into the other blind. Being new to this particular problem I tried gently pushing and prying on the foil thin shutter segments to see if they might suddenly “unjam”. This didn’t work and it turns out it isn’t he right thing to try at all.
    So I tried the best place to go when cameras are jammed. I took the bottom plate off.
This exposes the wind gears and linkages. When a camera is cocked and the film is advanced by a wind lever on the top all sorts of actions are coupled together. So I tried pushing and touching every lever to see if anything would suddenly free up the advance lever.
In another aside I found—after the shutter suddenly “unjammed”—that Nikon EM’s quite commonly jam their shutters. 
    If you are looking down into the open bottom with the lens mount facing away from you you should try pushing down gently on anything you can touch on the right side of the mirror box. This is at the opposite end of the camera from the film advance lever.
    I honestly was just trying to see what might move when suddenly the shutter fired.
    The Nikon EM metal shutter should look like this when it is working. This is the rear view. When the shutter fired the mirror dropped down into the normal position as shown in the opening image so you can’t really see the front of the shutter.
    Later testing of the camera with the proper batteries installed showed the meter was reading and the shutter speeds were changing, so I count this as a win!  

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