Daniel Pietzsch

Recovering a film that is stuck inside a Leica Mini Zoom

Recently, my Leica Mini Zoom compact camera wasn’t able to rewind a film after reaching the end of the roll. The result was that the film was stuck inside. Eventually, I managed to get it out again.

As most – if not all – electronic consumer film cameras, the Leica Mini Zoom automatically rewinds the film when it reaches its end. This time that wasn’t the case, probably because I used a bulk-loaded film. I can only guess what the exact reason was. But I suspect it was the way I taped the strip of bulk-film to the little bit of original film of a pre-used canister of HP5. And this then confused the rewind mechanism and prevented it from doing its thing.

The problem was that the take up spool was still locked and wouldn’t even let me pull off the film strip manually.

Preparations

For my attempts to rescue the film, I first put the camera into a dark bag, so it was safe to open the camera without exposing the film. I also put into the bag a drawing pin – to press in the tiny rewind button – and a developing tank – so that I could place the film directly in there after freeing it (and hence continuing to shield it from light).

I didn’t have any luck with the drawing pin and the rewind button: the camera would only pull the film further onto the take-up spool, and wouldn’t unlock the spool, either.

The solution

What was successful in the end was this: I first cut off the film from the canister. Then I pushed the film further into the camera and onto the take up spool until I only had a little bit of film left to hold on to ¹. The take up spool didn’t move while doing this, so this step was loosening the tension of the film on it. Then I pulled on the film using a little bit of force as I reached the tension point again. And this forceful pulling managed to retrieve a few more centimetres of film each time². Repeating these steps, I was able to recover more and more of the stuck film strip. And eventually the take up spool unlocked and I could simply pull off the remaining film in one last go.