The outer body, including the mirror housing, is a one piece alloy casting, the top cover is in two pieces, while inside, the shutter crate is a separately cast unit.
The removable base plate is identical in size to that on the Leica, but not interchangeable. Although having a different lens flange to film plane register, the lensmount is a 39mm screw mount, excluding all Leica fit lenses except for close up work. It is a particularly sturdy and clever little camera based on the original Leica camera concept, but taken one step further to become a true SLR with a fixed eyelevel pentaprism finder, yet rather basic in the mechanical design department, and it arrived too early for the upcoming innovations. The Zenit 35mm SLR camera hails from the USSR during the cold political climate of the early 1950’s, the manufacturer was the KMZ established in 1941 outside Moscow. If you mount an LTM lens on these cameras you can only focus at close range, not at infinity, due to the lens position. The early Zenit SLR have a specific screw mount, 39mm in diameter, sometimes called "ZM39" (or "Zenit M39") to distinguish it from the regular M39 (or Leica thread mount). The original Zenit was an SLR based on the Zorki rangefinder.
Zenit cameras (sometimes badged in cyrillic, ЗЕНИТ) were made by the KMZ factory near Moscow.
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