Topic: Confessions of a Lens Killer
If the cops dragged me in right now, the CSI's would not have to look far to find incriminating evidence of my crime. The corpse can be found in a kitchen trash bag...but his one good eye is in my shirt pocket.
It's an ugly story really, the story of a man, not particularly mechanically inclined, curios to see the inside of a lens.
With all good intentions, with all the appropriate tools and even with a few precautions, I disassembled a Lenitar 135mm preset, t-mount lens last night. The lens came to me "free" with a "needs repair" spotmatic (why do I buy this stuff?). The middle element of the lens had specks on it that were almost the size of grains of sand. This looked to be a good candidate for my mad experimentation. So, I removed the lens ring with no problems and began to remove the many very very small screws. I removed screws then removed focusing and aperture rings. I broke the thing down every way I could. I retained all the tiny parts in a bin and even worked in a baking pan (to catch anything that tried to get away). In the end though, the lens resisted my best efforts to get to the dirty element.
I worked for 2 hours at that thing...using everything short of a hammer (though I did briefly considered using one) and I was unable to get the damn thing apart.
With tired red eyes and more than a little frustration, I finally gave up. Off it went in to the kitchen can...only its front element, and the m42 t-mount remains.
Buze, now do you understand why I so freely sent those 50mm 1.4 super-taks to you? No lens should be left to my tender mercies.
What a DASTERDLY DEED! Hmm, I'll try to remember this when I think about taking a lens apart. 