G'day Zuiks,
Well, I'm happy to be back after a few months of absence and some
frustrating meandering through the Digest. I can now see why some members
have been so uptight regards the failure of a few posters to use plain text
in their messages.
Having now scraped most of the egg off I can relate a sorry tale. It
concerns the above lens which was purchased from another OM'er here in
Sydney via eb*y. He described it as brand new and it certainly looked it
when I took it out of his hands (literally) on the footpath outside his
place of work one very sunny day early in October. He is a keen astronomical
photog and uses an OM-1 but this lens was apparently unused by him (he'd
bought it from Henry's who'd had it on the shelf for some time). The glass
was spotless and the aperture appeared nice and snappy. Got it home and
started taking shots of the backyard boatbuilding project only to realise
that the only thing snappy about the aperture was the DOF button; the blades
were glued up rock solid. In the direct sunlight I'd mistakenly thought that
they were OK.
Now I've got this mate who is a keen camera picker who advised carefully
dismantling the lens while making sure that all component assemblies were
put to one side in their dismantled order until the aperture section was
arrived at. Remove that (he said) and simply dunk it in Shellite several
times while operating the blades and eventually all the oily stuff etc will
just evaporate away! Did that and the aforesaid blades became nice and
snappy again. Now to reassemble.
With a little sigh pile one of carefully kept-in-order bits toppled against
pile two of the same and I had a nice little domino effect of lens
components all over the bench.
I love a challenge. Not. Got the wretched thing back together again but
focussing jammed up solid. Dismantle and reassemble. Now some parts have
'picked up' and the aperture ring detent ball missing. All bits carefully
wrapped, put in chocolate box and taken to Whilton's in Sydney CBD. They
initially didn't want to know but four weeks later I got it back all
pristine again. Good people to deal with, they can manage impassive looks
while you just know they're thinking, "You silly bu**er!".
I've learnt a lot about lens construction. But maybe next time I'll leave it
to the experts...
John.
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