Blog #6 - I Fixed My Voigtländer Brilliant (Now I Feel Brilliant Too)

I Fixed My Voigtländer Brilliant (and Now I Feel Brilliant Too)

There’s something quietly satisfying about bringing something back to life that most people would’ve written off years ago. A camera from the 1940s, all Bakelite, glass, and stubborn engineering. The kind of object that looks more like a film prop than something that should still function. And yet, somehow, here it is, winding on, clicking, doing something it hasn’t done in decades. Not perfectly. Not reliably. But working all the same.

And I have to admit, I felt pretty good about that.

The Voigtländer Brilliant Focusing

From Mirrorless to Mystery Machines

This whole thing didn’t start as a grand plan. If you’d told me a year ago that buying a Sony A7III would eventually lead to dismantling 80-year-old cameras on the dining table and hunting through eBay listings for parts nobody makes anymore, I would’ve laughed politely and probably asked what a Voigtländer even was. Back then, I just wanted to learn photography properly, get to grips with the basics, and maybe stop ruining every other sunset photo I took. That was the plan, learn the exposure triangle, shoot in manual, take a few nice pictures, maybe print a couple out.

But at some point, I got curious about the old stuff.

It started with film. Not for any hipster reason, but because I wanted to understand where all this came from. What it meant to shoot slowly, deliberately, with limitations built into the process. I wanted to know what it felt like to have no LCD screen, no autofocus, no endless digital safety net. Just light, film, and whatever knowledge you brought to the moment. Just like when I was using cameras as a kid. I started reading, tinkering, looking at old cameras online, and that’s when I stumbled across the Voigtländer Focusing Brilliant v6.

The Haul: 11 for £24

It wasn’t a targeted search. I didn’t go looking for that specific model. It came in a bundle of eleven cameras for twenty-four quid. One of those classic eBay job lots where the pictures are half out of focus, the listing says “untested,” and you know half of it will be rusted through or missing its back. But that’s part of the fun. You’re not just buying cameras, you’re buying the possibility that one of them might still have some life in it.

This particular box also included a Zeiss Ikonta, which I was drawn to mostly because it had bellows and looked like a miniature concertina. I’ve already put a roll of 120 through that one and sent it off for development, half expecting it to come back fogged, scratched, or blank. But the Voigtländer stood out immediately, not because I knew what it was, but because it looked like something designed by someone who wasn’t entirely sure whether they were building a camera or a submarine. It was bold and blocky, twin lenses stacked vertically, covered in textured plastic that had survived surprisingly well, and full of strange little levers whose functions I didn’t understand yet.

£24 worth of vintage cameras

What Even Is a TLR?

The Brilliant is a TLR, a Twin Lens Reflex camera. That means it uses two lenses: the top one lets you compose your image through a waist-level viewfinder, while the bottom one takes the photo. The image is reflected upward through a mirror and projected onto a ground glass screen, so you can see your scene before you shoot. The view is flipped left to right, which takes some getting used to, but it’s surprisingly bright and usable when it’s clean. When you press the shutter, nothing electronic happens. There’s no screen, no sensor, no battery. Just gears, springs, and film.

Voigtländer, the company behind it, goes back to 1756, which is a staggering thought in itself. By the time this particular camera was assembled in 1941, Germany was deep into the Second World War. The Voigtländer factory in Braunschweig was producing optics and cameras in the middle of air raids and rationing, and yet, out came this little black box, a precision machine, built to capture moments in a world that was falling apart.

The First Signs of Trouble

The first sign that something wasn’t quite right came when I opened the back and found a roll of 120 film still inside. Not a new one. This was clearly from decades ago. The paper was curled, the backing numbers faded. Someone had loaded it, started shooting, and for whatever reason, never finished the roll. That felt oddly personal. Like finding a letter that had never been sent. It meant the camera had last been used by someone who was trying to capture something, and then stopped, maybe they got distracted, maybe it broke, maybe they just put it down and forgot.

But I couldn’t wind it on. The knob was stuck. No resistance, no click, just jammed solid. The shutter wouldn’t cock either, so the camera wasn’t doing anything. It felt frozen in place. After some digging, I learned that this model has a built-in interlock system designed to stop you from taking multiple exposures on the same frame. It’s a clever idea, but after eighty-odd years, the internal mechanism had seized, probably due to congealed oil, dust, and time turning everything into a sort of mechanical glue.

Taking It Apart

So I did what any overconfident amateur does when faced with an object they don’t understand, I started unscrewing things.

I’m not a technician. I haven’t trained in camera repair. I’ve never taken a class. But I’ve got access to YouTube, a set of cheap watch tools, and just enough stubbornness to make up for what I lack in actual knowledge. Inside, the camera was an intricate maze of levers, gears, and little springs that clearly served a purpose, even if that purpose wasn’t immediately obvious to me. I started poking around gently, watching how things moved, or didn’t.

A soon to be disengaged counter/interlock thing

Eventually, I got the interlock mechanism to release. The film advance started turning. I felt that satisfying resistance you get when the gear train engages properly. I thought I’d cracked it, until I reassembled the panel and found it was jammed again. Typical. I took it back apart and realised part of the issue was that modern 120 film is thinner than what this camera was designed for, so the spacing system doesn’t always behave. Most people disable the auto-stop feature altogether. So I did.

Wrestling the Cocking Lever

The next problem was the shutter cocking lever, which was completely locked. It wouldn’t move a fraction. I gave it a careful dose of watch oil, left it to soak, and came back the next morning. After some gentle persuasion and more than a little swearing under my breath, the lever finally shifted. I cocked the shutter and pressed the release. The blades snapped open and closed with a crisp little tick. Fast speeds seemed okay. The slower ones were a bit sluggish, and bulb mode is still unreliable, but that’s par for the course with gear this old.

The Mirror and the Date

When I removed the viewing hood and mirror assembly to clean the screen, I found something unexpected, a date, scratched faintly into the back of the mirror itself: 20/03/1941.

20,03,41 inscription on the mirror

Not a random doodle, but something etched with care. Likely put there by the person who assembled it. That hit me in a way I didn’t expect. Because while that camera was being built, in wartime Germany, my Grandpa was serving with the Royal Air Force in India. He was 21 years old, a corporal running the field hospital for a parachute training facility. It wasn’t glamorous work, but it mattered. He patched up the men who jumped out of planes for practice, and he kept them in the air. For that, he was awarded the British Empire Medal, a fact he never boasted about.

I have that medal now. It’s kept in the same room where I fixed this camera. Two objects from the same year. Two lives, lived on opposite sides of a war, now sitting together on a shelf in my house.

There’s something quietly profound about that.

Back Together

I eventually got the camera reassembled, more or less. The viewfinder was so clean that Bow, my four-year-old, tried to zoom in on it by pinching the screen, not quite understanding that what she was looking at was just a piece of glass and a mirror. The focus ring has slipped a little, so I’ll have to judge by eye. The frame counter doesn’t work, so I’ll be watching the red window on the back. And bulb mode is still temperamental. But it works.

And I plan to shoot with it.

The Baldixette Link

This isn’t my first time using a 6×6 medium format camera. I’ve already shot a roll through my Grandpa’s Balda Baldixette, a folding pop-lens camera made in 1956. It doesn’t have the mechanical complexity of the Voigtländer, but it has the same charm, the same square format, the same rhythm of shooting slowly and deliberately, with just twelve frames per roll.

That camera has a different kind of value. It’s not just about age or design, it’s about connection. It belonged to someone I knew, someone who shaped my family, someone who saw value in looking after people. And now, these two cameras, one inherited and one rescued sit side by side. Different eras, same format, same sense of purpose.Even Bow proudly tells people that she uses her great-grandpa’s camera!

Bow with her great-grandpa's Balda

Why I Bother

I’ve realised these repairs are more than just idle tinkering. They’re a kind of therapy, I think. A way of slowing down, focusing, disconnecting from the constant rush of digital life. There’s no instant gratification here. No notifications. Just a camera that only works if you give it the time and care it needs. I find something grounding in that. Something human.

And there’s a sense of quiet rebellion in it too. In a world that’s always demanding speed, efficiency, and perfection, working with old film gear is a reminder that sometimes, good enough is enough. That failure is part of the process. That patience has value.

What Bow Sees

Bow doesn’t care about shutter speeds or lens construction. She wants to know if we’re going to take pictures of ducks or clouds or flowers. She wants to press the shutter and hear it go click. She doesn’t know what the RAF was, and she definitely doesn’t grasp the significance of a date behind a mirror, but she does understand that old things can still be interesting. That they’re worth holding onto. That they’re part of something.

And she sees me try. She watches as I take things apart, get stuck, and eventually figure it out. That, to me, is worth more than perfect exposures.

What’s Next?

I’ve shuffled everything else on my list just to write about this. That should tell you something.

Next step is loading some film, probably HP5 and see what this thing can still do. I don’t expect sharpness or accuracy or modern performance. I just want to know what kind of images are capable from it.

And whatever I get, I’ll post them here. Blurry or sharp. Under or over. Because the point isn’t perfection. It’s the attempt.

Final Thoughts

Fixing this camera wasn’t really about the camera.

It was about history. About curiosity. About refusing to let something be useless just because it’s old and stuck. It was about connecting with the past in a way that feels real, not through textbooks or TV documentaries, but through the click of a shutter and the gentle resistance of a brass gear finally turning again.

It’s about my Grandpa, and Bow, and me, all linked by a camera that sat silent for 80 years.

And it’s about trying. Even when you don’t know exactly why