If you own a Bronica S2 or S2A, the leatherette is coming off. If it has not started yet, give it time. The original glue is sixty years old and tired, and it tends to let go of corners first, then whole panels. Mine had been doing this for a while. I had patched it up here and there. I had glued a few lifting corners back down. At one point I had even swapped in a waist level finder from a donor body with leatherette in a slightly different shade of grey, which had been quietly bothering me ever since.
So I finally took the whole thing off and put a new skin on. The new skin is faux snake skin, dark red, from Milly’s Cameras. The job took five or six hours spread over two days and used most of a bottle of methyl ethyl ketone. It very nearly killed me with solvent fumes. The camera now looks like nothing else I own, which is the point.
If you are thinking about doing the same to yours, here is everything that worked and a few things that did not.
What re-skinning actually is
The leatherette on a vintage camera is the textured covering on all the flat panels of the body. On a Bronica S2A there are twenty separate pieces of the stuff, glued to the metal underneath. The leatherette serves two purposes. It gives you grip, and it hides the screws you would need to remove to dismantle the camera.
A re-skin replaces all twenty pieces with new material. You can buy pre-cut kits for some popular cameras (Leicas, certain Nikons, certain Hasselblads) where the new pieces match the old ones exactly and you just peel and stick. For most other cameras, including the Bronica S2A, you cannot. You buy a sheet of leatherette and cut it yourself, using the old pieces as templates.
I bought my sheet from Milly’s Cameras in the UK. Milly’s is also where I get my light seal foam, and they sell a very wide range of camera repair sundries that you would otherwise have to source from three different places. The faux snake skin I bought is self-adhesive, which is something I would not have known to look for had I not done a glue test the previous year (more on that in a moment).
The plan, such as it was
I did not have a pre-cut kit. What I did have was twenty pieces of original leatherette stuck to the camera, each in its original shape. The plan was to lift those pieces off as cleanly as possible, stick them temporarily to the back of the new sheet, then cut around them with a scalpel to produce a new set in the same shapes.
Then strip the old glue off the camera and get the metal back to clean and shiny. Stick the new pieces on.
In theory.
![PLACEHOLDER: the Bronica S2A before re-skinning, with the scruffy original leatherette]
Step one, peeling
This was the easiest part. The original glue was so old that most pieces came up with a fingernail and a bit of patience. One or two were really stuck and needed a thin blade slid underneath, but nothing dramatic. A few of the bigger panels came up so cleanly I wondered if they had been replaced at some point in the camera’s life.
The trick is to peel slowly enough that the leatherette does not stretch. If it stretches, your template will be the wrong size when you cut around it, and you will be cutting again.
I laid each piece out on a clean sheet of paper as it came off, in a rough plan view of the camera, so I knew which piece went where. Twenty separate bits is enough that you absolutely will not remember which goes where if you do not keep track.
Step two, stripping the old glue
This was the hard bit. The leatherette comes off easily. The old glue does not. What is left after you peel is a thin, sticky, sixty-year-old residue that has bonded to the bare metal in a way that the original adhesive never intended.
I had read enough horror stories of people melting body panels with acetone that I did not want to start there. So I lined up an arsenal of solvents in the garage and tested them, one cotton bud at a time, on a small inconspicuous patch.
- White spirit. Almost no effect. Possibly softened the glue a little after a lot of scrubbing.
- Naphtha (lighter fluid). Same.
- Methylated spirits. A bit better. Maybe twenty percent of the residue would lift with enough scrubbing.
- IPA (isopropyl alcohol). Marginal.
- MEK (methyl ethyl ketone). This was the one. The residue softened almost immediately and came off with a few passes of a cotton bud.
MEK won and I committed to it for the rest of the job. With a fair word of warning: MEK is not actually any safer for camera bodies than acetone. It will damage paint and plastics just as much as acetone will. The reason I got away with using it on the Bronica is that I was careful. Small amounts, on cotton buds and eyelash applicators, applied only to the glue and never near any painted surface or plastic component. If you slosh it on, you will have a different problem than the one you started with. I have no scientific basis for thinking MEK is gentler than acetone in any meaningful way, and I would not want anyone to use this article as evidence that it is.
The other useful thing I want to recommend, and this is the actual tip of the week from the video. Eyelash glue applicators. They are tiny disposable brushes used by beauticians for applying glue to fake eyelashes, and they get into the corners and joints that cotton buds cannot reach. A small packet costs a couple of pounds and saved me an hour of frustration on the corners of the focus screen housing and the various small panels on the back of the camera.
Two solid hours of scrubbing with MEK and eyelash applicators got the body to bare, shiny metal. I went a bit lightheaded by the end, despite the garage doors being wide open. Take the breaks the fumes tell you to take.
![PLACEHOLDER: the Bronica S2A stripped to bare metal, between leatherette and re-skin]
A digression on the underlying camera
Worth saying. There is a moment, looking at a Bronica S2A with all the leatherette off and all the screw heads exposed, where you think you could just leave it like that. The bare metal is genuinely handsome. You can see how it goes together. You can see which screws come out for the top plate, which ones for the sides, which ones hold the mirror cage. It is an honest piece of mid-century Japanese engineering and there is something appealing about seeing it without its costume.
I did not leave it like that. The screw heads ruin the look, and the leatherette is there for grip as well as for show. But for about five minutes I considered it.
Step three, cutting the new pieces
Back inside, on a fresh cutting mat, with a fresh scalpel.
The plan was to stick each piece of old leatherette to the back of the new sheet, sticky side together, then cut around the old piece with a scalpel. Mostly this worked. The pieces stayed put while I cut, and the new piece came out roughly the same shape as the old.
The problem was that the leatherette on a Bronica is not symmetrical, but you might assume it is. The piece for the bottom-and-front (one panel that wraps around the corner) is mirrored compared to the equivalent piece on the other side. If you cut both pieces using the same template the wrong way up, you get two identical pieces that fit one side perfectly and the other side not at all. Solution: peel the template back off and flip it to the correct side, or cut from the back of the sheet with the template upside down.
I worked this out after wasting one bit of new material. Twenty pieces in total. Two false starts.
Round shapes did not come out well with a scalpel. There are a few circular bits on the camera, small discs that sit around the strap lugs and the tripod plate fixings. For these I used a leather punch, the kind you tap with a hammer. A delicate camera repair done with a hammer is funnier than it has any right to be, and the punched circles came out perfect every time, which is more than I could say for the freehand scalpel circles.
![PLACEHOLDER: cutting a new piece with a scalpel, using the old leatherette as a template]
Step four, sticking it on
The self-adhesive backing makes this part easy in theory. Peel the protective film, line up the piece, press it down, smooth out any bubbles.
In practice there are two things to watch for.
The old leatherette had stretched in places over sixty years of use, which meant that the template I had cut around was slightly bigger than the area on the camera body. Some pieces fitted perfectly. A few were slightly oversized and needed a hair trimmed off one edge. One or two had to be re-cut from scratch.
The other thing is that once a self-adhesive piece is down, it is down. You get one shot at alignment. If you press it on at an angle and try to peel it back up to re-position, you risk stretching the material or leaving adhesive residue on the body. So I did each piece slowly, sighting along the edge of the camera body, lowering one edge first and rolling the rest of the piece down with my thumb.
By the end of two days I had a complete set of twenty pieces, all stuck on, all in roughly the right place. The strap lug discs took a third attempt because I had been using a punch that was very slightly too big. The result is not flawless, but it is close enough that you have to look hard to see the imperfections.
![PLACEHOLDER: the finished Bronica S2A in dark red faux snake skin]
Was it worth it
Honestly? Yes. The camera looks like nothing else I own. The snake skin is bold without being garish, and the dark red works against the brass and chrome trim. On a shelf full of black and grey bodies, this camera now really stands out.
But I would not want to do it again in a hurry. Six hours of work, two hours of which was solvent scrubbing. And the constant low-grade anxiety of cutting an expensive piece of material with a scalpel and hoping the angle is right. For a camera you love and intend to keep, it is genuinely satisfying. For a camera you are flipping in three months, completely pointless.
If you want to try it on your own S2 or S2A, three things will save you time.
The first is, if you can find a pre-cut kit for your specific camera, pay the premium. Even three times the cost of a plain sheet is worth it, because you save yourself the cutting and the false starts. There are no pre-cut Bronica S2A kits that I have found, so this advice is theoretical for this particular body, but it is the first thing I would say to anyone re-skinning a Leica or a Hasselblad.
The second is, buy self-adhesive material. The alternative is contact adhesive, which is messy and smelly. And like self-adhesive, it is one-shot, so the upside is zero.
The third is, do the solvent test on a hidden corner before you commit to any solvent for the whole job. Cameras vary and paints vary, so what worked on my Bronica might melt yours.
The snake-skin S2A in the wild
The first real outing for the new skin was the Analogue Spotlight event in Worcester the following weekend, where I picked up new lens boards from Simon Forster and met Steve Lloyd from Chroma Cameras. After that the camera came on a trip to Namibia and South Africa later that year, where it earned its keep across two countries and several thousand miles. The South Africa article has a frame of an elephant in Kruger that is the keeper of the whole trip.
This is also the camera I wrote an appreciation of some years later, while stuck in Canada without it for several weeks. The snake skin is the version that appears in those photos. It still looks the same now as it did the day I put it on.
Closing thought
There is one thing about the Bronica S2A that no amount of new leatherette will change, and it might be my favourite thing about the camera. The shutter and mirror together make a sound like a small piece of industrial machinery completing an important task. You do not need to look at the camera to know you have taken a photograph. You can hear it. It is, in the best possible sense, an auditory camera.
I am going to stop typing now before I write any more about it.