Took me 5 hours to figure out my shutter was capping at 1/1000 because of a bent curtain blade

Mila Price · 2026-09-22T15:20:03.767641+00:00

I had a customer's Canon AE-1 on the bench with a weird dark band on the right side of every frame at high shutter speeds. I checked the light seals, swapped the mirror bumper, even ran three rolls of film through it before I finally pulled the bottom plate off and watched the curtain travel with a slow motion camera on my phone. Turns out one curtain blade was bent just a tiny bit and was dragging, capping the shutter at anything faster than 1/500. I straightened it with a small pair of flat nose pliers and a lot of patience, and the test roll came back clean. Has anyone else run into bent curtain blades on these old cloth shutter cameras, and do you just bend them back or swap the whole curtain?

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Took me 5 hours to figure out my shutter was capping at 1/1000 because of a bent curtain blade | Camera Repairers - Talk Freely