Attempt at saving a topcor 13.5cm

[belgiumreporter]

The 13.5cm RE auto topcor wich came with the Topcon RE super set i've bought is in bad shape.






Because i had little to loose i thought i would take it apart to (try to)clean the lens elements. So off i went:



After removing the front lens and lens retainer rings to front element came out



These tiny screws on the barrel need to be removed in order to unscrew the front tube.




The lens block can now be pulled out



After the retaining ring is unscrewed the middle lens block can be removed



Then the alloy light baffle can be unscrewed, the middle lens block can now be cleaned



I've used a sensorcleaning swab and lighter fuel to clean the glass surface, the stains on the swab is what came of one surface!



There was nothing wrong with the diafragm



The rear element can be unscrewed and cleaned.



A large patch of mould could not be removed because it sat between two kitted elements, solving this is beyond my capabilities.


 

I was happy i was able to put everything back in the right order so the lens is now fully operational again, to bad for the mould between the elements.

Now on to the next project wich i hope will be more succesfull.

[paulhofseth]

Shocking venture. After having read about Leitz accuracy demands where 1/100 mm is regarded as worth adjusting to, and seen how short a distance that really is on my microscope measuring slide, I would not have dared to unscrew anything out of worry that tightening an extra turn would move glass one hundreth too close to the next element So I have never attempted such surgery. But haze and mushrooms is of course much worse than upsetting the seidel fault balances. The cemented bits can reputedly be separated by draconian measures, but only rejoined by very difficult centering methods.

p.

[belgiumreporter]

Things went from bad to worse today, while i was working on the RE i took the opportunity to take the prism apart in an attempt to straighten out the dents in the prismhousing a little bit. I knew there wasn't much hope in achieving anything as it is common knowledge that dented sheet metal is stretched and it need to be shrunk to get out the dents (at least that's how it goes on car body work) so  i ended up with something different, but just as worse as it was before. To my "luck" the prism itselve isn't damaged and while the pieces where apart i was able to clean them. 

Just as bad as before:

The Vivitar 35 2.8 in topcon mount came with the set as well.

The next "disaster" is the Contax RX... I finally came to try the fix wich is explained in the tech manual for the diafragm value transfer problem. For this repair a Zeiss 1.4 50mm is needed but  i thought maybe a Yashica 1.4 50mm in Contax mount would work as well.
I got through the first steps resetting the value transfer, but when the "now set the lens to f16" step was next i kept getting the EEE error code.
From what i could see it is probably the sloped cam wich is on the Zeiss lenses and not on the Yashica ones wich could possibly be the cause of the reset not working. Now i'm not going to fork out 3 or 400€ for a Zeiss 50mm 1.4 as i am not sure if this will work and the problem lies with the camera. So maybe one day i'll be able to lend that lens from some one and see if this is the reason why things do or do not work.

The contax mount of the yashica lens:


The Zeiss 50 1.7 with the sloped cam :


Maybe now i'm gonna do some other things before i start dismanteling project camera's again i've had it for this week