As a personal project I bought a broken Argus C3 on eBay, and managed to completely clean and fix it, however it involved taking the lens apart since there was dead insects and dirt inbetween the lenses.
Now the camera is back together and I took a bunch of pictures, but they are blurry when using open aperture.
How can I properly calibrate the lens and camera back to infinity without having to go through a ton of films?
The Argus C3 is focused using the rangefinder.
These instructions are for rangefinder calibration.
Worth noting that by current expectations, the C3 may not be terribly sharp wide open. I mean if you are pixel peeping, don’t expect Sumicron results.
[edit] More Argus service manuals at Learn Camera Repair.
[edit] Typically a manual focus lens achieves infinity focus when the helicoid is fully retracted.
Which is to say infinity focus is when the lens helicoid is entirely unextended and closer than infinity focus is achieved by extending the lens in the helicoid.
However this assumes that the lens is the correct distance from the film plane and hence that any required shims are in place to provide the correct film to lens distance.
