Nikon 105mm 1.8 lens: Disassembly
Transcipt
Hi, This is Jim from International Camera Technicians.
I have this nice lens here. Nice Nikkor. It’s a 105 millimeter 1.8. Very nice piece of glass a customer sent to me and it is extremely stiff on the focus. Yeah, I’m putting a lot of muscle into trying to get this thing to move. We’re going to go ahead and take this apart completely. We are going to then clean it up, re-lube it, and put it all back together for the customer.
This will be a take apart on this section and there will be another video on how to put it back together. If you want to see me clean, let me know, I’ll show you how to clean stuff, which is really not a big deal, but if you need to know, let me know.
Remove set screw and hood
What I start to do is to take this thing apart and the first thing to do is take this set screw out. There’s a small, little set screw there. Almost all Nikon lenses have some set screw in the front. Not all, but many do. Look for a screwdriver (that’s good enough.) We’ll go in there and go ahead and take this little set screw out and I’ll put it in my little parts holder. These [hoods] can be tight. This one’s not. And go ahead and screw, it comes loose, no big deal. It’s got a nice little built-in hood. So that’s off.
Nice — a really nice element [lens glass]. So you want to go ahead and get this element out of the way.
These can be tight, so I’ll put on the hand grip [knit gloves with heavy rubber coating on the palms and fingers]. These are great little gloves — it’s just tight in there. It takes a little extra effort, but not much.
Get rid of the glove. Go ahead and take this guy [the lens glass] out. Come on — a wonderful, nice big element. Set it aside; don’t scratch it.
Remove the inner sleeve
Okay so we got a nice diaphragm in there. Diaphragm’s been working fine. I don’t have to take this diaphragm apart. If you do, it’s not that big of a deal, but you know it’s different and people kind of freak out when they see a different type of diaphragm.
So we’ll go ahead and take the inner sleeve out. That’s a ton of oil all around this rim here; I’ll take care of that. That’s just waiting to get right into that diaphragm. So put this aside. Put it out of the way. You don’t need it right now.
Remove the rear mount
Let’s go ahead and take the rear mount off. We have five screws on this one. Careful on Nikon lenses; sometimes there’s only four, especially on the older ones, and they will trick you. Even I don’t know every single one of them. So I go ahead, and I get my screwdriver. I get my large screwdriver. These screws can be tight. Normally they’re in with glue.
It looks like someone’s had a nice little go with this [tried to unscrew them before]. And the one over here too, so I expect them to be fairly tight. I think they started around them, but at least they stopped. Always bear down pretty hard on them. There we go; they’re going pretty nice. So someone’s had them out at one point. There we go. Just a ton of excess glue that Nikon loves to stick on them [the screws].
Remove the f-stop ring
Okay everything’s out of the way. There are lots of wonderful little coupling systems in here [inside the rings] and that’s going to go into the diaphragm. I took the one out of the lens [demonstrates by moving and clicking the coupling]. When we put it all back together, I’ll show you how they go. There are two focus keys on there, one down over there. Let’s get the rest of it apart.
So this [f-stop] ring comes out. The lever here has to come out of the way, so you get two screws. Hard to see one there, one there. Put a lot of pressure [on the screws] because these are tight, too. They tend to be glued in. This one did not disappoint. Next one same thing. There we go. I wobble [the screws] back and forth; it’s one of the best ways to break the glue. Look — [the lever] fell out.
Now take off the f-stop ring. Comes out very tight on the f-stop ring, so that’s going to have to be cleaned, too. Yeah — this guy will probably have to come out. Why they switched from Phillips [head screws] to a nice flathead [screw], I don’t know.
Mark the index
To make things quicker, do two things. First of all, mark the short edge, so you don’t worry about putting the spring, when you put it back together, going the wrong direction. It’s not a big deal if you do; you just have to take a little extra time to undo it and redo it.
I always mark my front; that is my index mark. Remember about marking the index mark. Put one on there. You’ll get lost if you don’t. Even if you don’t [get lost], it just makes it so much easier. If you do forget to mark it, you can always put your f-stop ring in and wherever it hits the stop you know [that’s your index]. If that wasn’t there you could tell, so it’s not a big deal on this one [lens] to find where it goes. It’s just easy with a mark; you just to look at it — boom — the spring goes down and you’re all done.
Remove the index ring
Alright, so, this comes out, this little metal ring here. (Maybe. I can’t remember if I have to take the leatherette off first.) These [screws] have glue on them too, but they’re not in tight, so they’re not making it too difficult. Slip your index ring off; see no index. If didn’t put a mark there, you wouldn’t know where your idex was. I’m stacking all this up over here so it can get washed and clean.
Remove the leatherette and tape
Alright so, let’s go ahead and peel this leatherette up. I just get under the edge [with a screwdriver]. Be careful with some of these leatherettes; they just start getting old and brittle. If they are, be a lot more careful than I just was.
Alright — tape. Yes, there is tape and there is tape holding your lens together. A very expensive Nikon lens has tape, but the force that is exerted on the tape in the right directions actually make it quite strong.
Alright, so there we go. I’m already starting to pull away. I mark this quick little alignment for when I put it back together. I don’t know if that’ll be in the exact spot. It could be over here, depends on where it comes to infinity. Sometimes just doing the littlest thing changes things slightly.
Remove the front ring and dissolve the glue
Okay, so that ring comes off. It’s just a bunch of dirt [points to dirt] and you can see all the dirt — wow —so we can go ahead and we can take off this front ring. You can see right there, there is some glue. I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to dissolve the glue on it. [Uses Q-tip with solvent.] Just go along that rim. [Pulls out small ball-peen hammer] I’m going to give it a very light tap. Sorry about if [the camera] is vibrating a bit. It probably is.) alright yeah, I didn’t even need the grippy glove that’s out.
Make additional index marks
Okay so what we got here is an index mark. I don’t care where the rest of it’s marked. I like to go straight up. I always know this is going to be towards the front. It almost always is so carefully put in a scratch mark — my “V” — mark where it continues on the other side. [This is] here they all go. You can’t really get down in there to put a height mark on this one and probably not going to need it. You know this is going to be another “V” up here and you know that’s going to be very close to that edge so once again I make my marks. [Close up] You can barely tell the height mark, but the “V” is in there. It shouldn’t be an issue; you should be able to put that together no problem.
Remove the keys
Alright so now I get to take these keys out. That’s your slop adjustment key — your slop adjustment screw — right there. Let’s get the keys out. These may be super tight; they can be anywhere from tight to incredibly tight.
That was easy enough. I’m bearing down pretty hard when I put my screwdriver in. I’m trying to just barely lightly put it in. I’m going all the way down, putting some weight behind it when I turn my screwdriver. You can use some acetone, or alcohol is probably better, to dissolve the glue but just didn’t need it. I don’t really care which side has my key on it, but I will mark this one more towards the front. A little scratch mark, just in case if they’ve kind of worn into each other.
Unscrew the lens
Alright, so let’s start to unscrew this lens; this one just seeing that, I see it does have a couple of starting points. This is where your marks come incredibly handy, so let me do it this way because I’m right-handed. You can feel it’s almost ready to break. There. So [add a] plus mark. [Match the] plus mark to the “V” [and it will go] straight on in.
Remove the second key.
Unscrew the remaining ring. You can see we’ve got a ton of starting positions on this one [ring]. Right there, this one’s super loose right there. Let me hold that together so I can put my “T” mark on it. Voila!
So it’s pretty much a 105mm 1.8 taken apart; that didn’t take too long.
Now I have to clean all this garbage up and get this old lube out of there. That’ll take a little bit of time.
So we’re going to go ahead and just end the video here and I’ll create another video of me putting this lens back together.
Thank you for watching. Take care. Bye!