On a somewhat happier note, it looks like I've just got myself two good lenses for 350 Norwegian Kroner + a few hours of playing around with screwdrivers, a drill, various solvents and some oil... That's an M28/2.8 and a 135/3.5 - the original K version.
I've sort of been thinking I should get "something wider for landscapes" (to quote a suggestion to someone else in some recent thread...), so when I saw an advert for an M28 by someone who lives just 3 or 4 kilometres I way, obviously I had to go and have a look. The asking price was 500. Now, as I was on my way to look at the lens, having decided to give the guy what he wanted it the lens looked OK, the seller actually phoned me and said that he was very sorry, but he had just found that the lens had somewhat of a sticky aperture problem. He wondered if I sill might want it, though, in order to try to fix it, and said he would give me a much reduced price if I did. So I still went up to the bloke's house, and to make a long story short, I ended up getting the 28 and a 135 which had a similar problem, only much worse, for a total of NOK 350. And now I have managed to put the 28 into near perfect working order. Mind you, it was not entirely straight forward. I had to give up on loosening one of the screws on the back cover, and literally drill it out (thankfully, we have some good machinery for such tasks where I work.) I also had my doubts for a while about whether I could make the diaphragm work properly, as neither wiping the aperture blades with dry cotton nor using butane a.k.a. lighter gas as recommended by others who have fixed similar problems, seemed to quite do the trick. And the blades were not obviously oily in the first place. But then I sprayed a minor amount of something called CRC 5-56 around the lever that's connected to the aperture ring, and hey presto; the resistance in moving the blades was suddenly all gone, and the iris would snap open and shut just the way it should. As for the 135, this lens clearly had significant amounts of oil - or some kind of liquid, anyway - on the blades, and wiping this off definitely helped. It's now in a state where I'm fairly confident that aperture will close down more than fast enough, but I'm still not sure I'm 100% happy with it, as the aperture lever still doesn't feel quite as light as I think it should - if you know what I mean. - Toralf -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
