Nikon 35mm Lens Disassembly

Transcript

Hi, this is Jim from International Camera Techs.

Today I’m going to show you how to take apart this lens. This is the Nikkor and I’ll show you some of the big mistakes that people make. Really watch this video before you start taking a lens apart because you’re going to learn something.

What we have is this Nikon 35mm. It’s a f/2 and it’s got really dry lube. So we’re going to go ahead, we’re going to completely take it apart and we’re going to replace the lube with quality modern lube so this thing will run for another 25 years. Well, let’s get started.

Disassemble outer and front rings:

My first thing I want to do is get this rubber ring off and they’re usually just lightly glued so I just get underneath it, come around and break any glue that might be on it and out it comes. Next ring is this ring right here. You can see the break mark in it, right there. I’m going to go ahead and twist that off. That comes out.

Ok, the next step you want to do is look for a set screw. These front rings always have a set screw somewhere; the set screw has to come out. So don’t try and take this out without taking the set screw out. Then this comes out, this can be tight.

When you take the rings off don’t grab so tight because if I grab it super tight I can actually distort this barrel slightly and it can actually grip the threads even harder, so that makes it much more difficult to get them off.

Remove front element and focus ring:

Okay front element on this lens comes out; it’s loose. It comes out, it’s nice. Set it aside. Don’t scratch it.

Alrighty so I’ll take the rear cap off. Alright, we can take the focus ring off. Many lenses come apart in different ways, but this one’s fairly simple and this is one of the more simple lenses to work on.

So just take that out — the three screws. Second one, and the third.

So these are slip rings; this thing can go anywhere it wants to. [When we’re done we’ll] tighten those screws down and that’s where your focus will be. And it’ll come to a stop so we have infinity.

So this essentially is your focus ring right here: that’ll close down, now there’s no stop in it, because your stop is actually on this ring here. It will kind of feel mushy when you get to the back, but don’t worry about that, just don’t bend anything.

Remove the rear mount:

Alright so we’re going to go ahead and take the rear mount off. This is not a big deal, it’s three screws, one, two, three. Don’t worry about this inner ring. A lot of people take the inner ring off you do not need to. Not on these lenses. AF [auto-focus] lenses yes; this lens, no.

So just do one, two, and three.

Okay, three screws. These are difficult screws to get out if you take a look at the screw, it’s got a bunch of white stuff. The white stuff is glue, which means, it can be in there extremely tight. These aren’t too bad. They came out pretty easy. If it was super tight, and I couldn’t get it out I may come in here with a hammer and just give it a shock value; the shock breaks the glue and then sometimes they come up. Other people like to use acetone down in it but I never could figure out how acetone gets into a thread, but I guess it could.

Alright so mount comes up, coupler. That coupler there needs to go around that wonderful little shaft right there, otherwise you get no diaphragm action. This is your f-stop ring, make sure it goes in this direction [with brass piece fully visible] and not upside down. They will go on both ways. It won’t work that way; it’ll work this way.

This ring is just on there, just slips on. Out it comes; it couples in with this ring. And I’ll show you when I put it together how that all couples up.

So that’s the back side, not a whole lot going on there. Go ahead and take this ring off.

Mark the index:

Now, here’s where you start to get into issues. You need to know where the front is. As soon as I take this ring off here, it’s got the front index.

As soon as I take that off, you do not have a mark knowing where the front of the lens is, there are ways to find it out, but you do not know. So I always do this: I always put a mark on it telling me where my front is. I like to use an arrow, you can use whatever you want. Just make your marks different for different things that you want to do.

So three screws come out. Okay, my ring’s going to come off, well it comes off from the front direction, sometimes front sometimes back, so it comes off and now as you can see, no index mark. Your index mark is here. If i hadn’t marked it, you wouldn’t know. But you can see my mark right there, it’s a little “V”. It’s all I like to put on it and at this point it becomes actually the most important thing that you can do when taking a lens apart.

I tend to get to a certain point — I don’t care what your point is — where it’s coming apart. I have my “V” mark, so I’m going to put my “V” mark up here [on the other ring] because this is, this ring, is separate from that ring and that ring. You have three rings moving here. See how this one comes out, not a little, little bit of movement on that one [middle ring]; a lot of movement in here [front-most ring].

Alright so what I like to do is I come in and I put one [mark] here on the front and another one there. Where that [horizontal line] starts is the depth of this ring here. And the depth from here[inner-most ring] to here [middle ring] is extremely important. Just like the depth from here [middle ring] to here [front-most ring] is important. So you have those two in line (let me make that a little clearer). The other one also needs a “V” on it. All my “V”s are roughly in alignment and then my height is marked as well.

So now when I come out a little bit you can see a “V” and they have a height mark that’s the same on this one [the middle ring] the “V” and there is a height mark. I don’t know if you can see it, but it is there. You’ll see it when I get it apart and this one of course doesn’t really need it.

Remove focus keys & take rings apart:

So now what I’m going to do is these are focus keys. These focus keys now come out and once you’ve had these marks here there’s no way you can get these in incorrectly. I’m going to take these out; these are glued in pretty good. But the red glue is not too bad to break. Make sure your screwdrivers are quality screwdrivers.

Okay now, everything here is coming apart and this is where people get mixed up. Okay so this guy’s going to come out. You can see these are micro threads. These micro threads may have one, maybe two starting points, sometimes three.

What I do is go slow at the end. I’m going very slow, there, broke right there. And that’s where I felt it come apart. I’ll put it back slightly in, it comes — I’m just barely tugging this direction on this rim — and as soon as I feel it start to come my direction. There — it broke loose —and I kind of clamped it with my fingers and I put a mark across there.

My assembly mark is a “T” and that may be very small, but that is a little “T”. That right here — I line my “T” with the “V” and I know that screws in [to the other].

Not so important on this one, but it will be important on this next one I do. So I look for the “V”. There’s my next one — a “V” — screw it out and now there’s like a ton of starting points.

You take it out with no index marks or no depth marks. You could do it with this one and just put it in. but you’re trying a whole bunch.

It’s just if you do it the way I do it it’s so much simpler and I’m just barely pulling on it. I know I’m coming to the end there, broke, clamp it together, mark a T or a plus, whatever you want to call it. So there we go, now if I have to put together, boom I don’t have to guess what direction it’s going in so when these two are down, they line up.

Recap key points:

So that’s the biggest problem I see with people taking things apart: they don’t keep their markings consistent. They don’t do their height. There are a number of different ways to do the height, but I found this is absolutely the most simple.

So what I’m going to do is go ahead and clean this up, and then I’ll make another video on how to reassemble this lens and we will do everything right down to focus.

Okay that’s it with the disassembly of this nice little 35 millimeter. I hope you learned something and if you have any questions feel free to leave a comment or visit our website at ictcamera.com for more information.

Thank you very much.