The good news is that I now feel like I have a new lens! Can't wait till tomorrow to take some shots.
Probably the biggest mishap was that one of the mount screws had been burred fairly substantially and couldn't be removed at first (burring it further). We were getting ready to drill it out when I gave it one last try and thankfully it did come out. Upon reassembly, we managed to machine the head of a screw (don't even ask!) that Rob managed to dig up, so that it fit the indent nicely - looks better than the original screws (-:
Anyway, apart from that it was all good. Taking out the mount and aperture ring pretty much made it simple to lift out the rear groups in one piece, and from there we could access the muck by simply opening the aperture. While it was very fine, we reckoned it looked like metal filings! Pretty serious stuff. Got rid of all that plus gave the surface a good clean, then reassembly all went smoothly (of course the old 'which way did this go in?' and dropping bits into the lens and having to tip them out happened but weren't significant).
Haven't done any real tests or much shooting with it yet, but I'm pretty impressed so far. Even wide open with the 1.7x AF converter it's resolving nicely at non-macro distances. Anyway, tomorrow I'll probably get out there and try some more shots.
Oh - and regarding the bearings that can be heard - we did see these just underneath the mount and it all looked normal. Rob's Voigtlaender does a similar thing he says. Perhaps a bit of lube or something in there might deaden them in some samples.
I'm afraid that an addiction to tampering and fiddling might have just begun... :-D
Cheers, David
David Nelson wrote:
G'day,
Looks like I'll be cracking this lens (Kiron 105mm f/2.8 macro) open in the near future to remove a load of rubbish from just in front of the diaphragm. Got it off eBay recently and was very annoyed to find this muck, but otherwise it's in pretty good nick and am keen to see the results it can deliver.
Anyone here opened it up before? Any tips or warnings of things to be careful of would be much appreciated. If anyone had a lens diagram that'd be awesome too. By the way, is it normal to hear ?bearings? rolling around in the lens?
Thanks!
David
