And yet more learning-by-screwup. And again with the film advance & rewind mechanism.

On this camera, unlike any other that I've had, if you advance the film to the very end, instead of just stopping the lever travel and making an unpleasant noise, with this camera, the first warning you get is your last: the spockets strip out of the holes in the film, and the whole system jams. Including the rewind lever.

So I'll have to take it to my photo developing place to have them extract the film in a darkroom. Oh, well... the film was free, and it expired 15 years ago. If it's trash, it's trash.

But it seems that I was right about the previous sprocket-stripping problem. At least this time, it got to the very end of the roll before it jammed. And I think I know what I did wrong this time, too. On this camera, you have to set the film counter at "1" manually, after you load the film. What I had done was to do what I do on my SLRs, and taken a few throw-away lead-in shots while making sure the film was seated and spooling correctly. Then I set the counter. And so, when I looked at the camera, and the film counter read "31," I thought I had a few more shots to go.

I was wrong.

--Shannon