Normally you'd have next to no chance: not many AFM35's were made and they mainly appealed to well-off, older, amateur photographers. As a result used ones are rarely for sale and parts donors are as rare as rocking horse droppings. If you do find a parts donor they've likely been dropped damaging the battery cover which as you have discovered is exactly where the camera tends to land.
On the plus side, the cover on this model is a round bayonet type fitting much like the type used on some film SLRs and sometimes on motor drive covers. I don't currently have an AFM35 in my collection but I do have a Canon Sureshot Classic 120 and the battery cover looks like it may well be a functional replacement for your damaged one. As a first point of call visit a camera repairer or a large used film camera outlet to try a few covers for size. if you're in the UK and in the London area then Mr.Cad in Croydon is hard to beat for odd parts like these. I'm confident that you'll find a cover which fits, but you may need to do a little surgery to transplant parts from the old cover to the new to get a functional cover.
Sureshot Classic 120's are fairly easy to find and go very cheaply (£15 or so on auction sites). If you see one in good condition then you've nothing to lose in trying it: even if the cover does not fit you'll discover that the camera originally cost about the same as the Rollei and does pretty much everything the Rollei does. The light metering is highly reliable and the spot metering is superb. I can honestly say that the 38-120mm zoom lens outperforms some of my Leica and Zeiss T* primes and in my opinion is the best lens ever fitted to any compact 35mm which I've owned.
I hope that you've found my suggestions to be of some use and ask only that you return the favour by rating my answer.
Comments:
Oct 07, 2009
- Happy to have helped.
Mr Cad is a veritable treasure trove of old cameras, parts, books and all sorts of odds 'n sods and the staff are very knowledgeable and helpful. But they are rather old fashioned and it's fair to say that the prices they ask for most used cameras and lenses are a little behind the times but parts like caps, straps, cases and covers are usually pretty fair and everything is open to haggling. Out of date film is a bargain but typically four years past it's date, but so far I've found no worse than very slight colour shifts which are fully corrected with ease when printing or scanning.
It's a old goods warehouse style shop, and has it's own free car parking. It's just outside central Croydon so traffic isn't too bad. West Croydon rail/tram/bus station is an easy ten minute walk away and Selhurst rail is about fifteen minutes on foot.
You'll leave the shop wondering how on Earth they make enough money to stay in business, but they've been in exactly this state since I first visited them in 1991...
Hope you enjoy your visit :-)