Vintage still lenses disassembly!

When I started shooting film photography I was always looking to improve my images so I always wanted to use the next set of interesting lenses. My first camera was Canon AV1 which had a Canon FD lens. It was pretty pristine so never had to think how to get inside. With time I saw quite a few people used Minoltas and the colours of the images were way too good so I thought it must be the lens! Later it turned out that that was not the only factor haha but I was not aware of the post processing that labs do and I was a bit naive. Anyways.

So I bought a very nice Minolta camera XD7 which had everything and it was so easy to use! I also bought I set of Minolta lenses for it and it was cheap! When I got them from the seller from Ebay, I realized they lied to me saying how they were in great condition because all 4 lenses had fungus.

I was very disappointed. So I was debating for a while if I should try to clean them myself. The problem was I had a feeling I could do it and also it was rare that these particular lenses were up for sale, if they were the price tag was hefty!

So I started watching tutorials, the tutorials I found were for similar models of my lenses but not the same! So there was a bit of a learning curve for me.

First I started to disassemble a zoom lens because that one was of least value and it was too fungusy so even less value. It was a 70-200mm from memory.

I bought a set of JIS screwdrivers that work on any Japanese lenses. I also got a wrench to unscrew the named plate in the front. I managed to take off the front bit, however that led nowhere. I had to take off the rear bit too, those bits consisted of some single glass elements and some elements that were glued together in a group. Then I cleaned the glass elements with peroxide to eliminate the fungus. It was pretty easy, nothing was etched. I washed them with soap. Beware of soaking the glued elements in soap, that will ruin the glue. So do not put them under water, just wash them on the surface!

There is a tricky bit with the rear. That is because you will touch the aperture. In most decent lenses it has a nice easy mechanism, as soon as you unscrew the rear cap element, the aperture mechanism hook can be easily unhooked back and hooked again. However!!!! In some models the hook is hooked in a very tricky way (and this is how I spent hours trying to put back together the aperture of my first zoom lens) so you need to be careful and see how it works before you unhook it. Also you need to watch out for the little ball inside the aperture ring, that one makes sure there are clicks when you set the aperture of the lens! You can either take it out or keep it in place and make sure it doesn't fall out of the ring!

Once you get to the rear and possibly take off the aperture ring for ease of access, you can see the rear element glass group, that one should be unscrewed with your hands! If it's stiff which it is probably, you will need pliers. But please do not go further down the lens and unscrew all those bits, you will likely damage the focusing ring! I have done that in the past and one of my lenses now has a very stiff focus because I unscrewed the focus ring since I didn't understand how to get to the rear glass and take it out. You don't have to do that, you have access to the glass and you can take it off as soon as you reach the aperture ring and take that one off!

This is what it looks like before you take off the rear glass but as soon as you remove the rear cap!

Then you remove the aperture ring and you can take off the rear glass!

Now you have access to the diaphragm! You should clean it up with peroxide and you have also access to the front glass. However, you should take off the front glass from the front! Once you do that you will have no glass elements in the lens anymore. All in the wash - I mean just the glass! :)

Clean the mechanical bits from dust with peroxide!

I have tried this technique with around a dozen lenses now - all Japanese and it works very very similar. I have also advised some of my friends how to do it, it's not hard, if you are good at legos you will be great at this.

Just a note that sometimes you might see that the stubborn fungus returns. So you should monitor the lenses, may be you didn't clean the entire bacteria.

Good luck!