Brightening 35RC rangefinder window?

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Rigby

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I recently bought a RC off of eBay and it seems to work well except it's a little on the 'crusty' side and as such the viewfinder and rangefinder square is a bit dirty which makes focusing (particularly in low light) a bit tricky. Short of sending it to be serviced, is there some sort of easy fix to clean it up or make it easier to focus? I suppose I could use the distance on the focusing wheel to estimate.

I'm not terribly keen on opening it up and will only do it as a last resort. I'm really not good at doing fiddly things and I'd hate to break it! 😛

Thanks.
 
Thanks Colin, that looks good. Will give it a try. 🙂

Say I did decide to open it up thought, what exactly would I be looking at doing to clear it up? Just general cleaning or would I want to polish the mirrors or something?
 
I wouldn't touch the mirrors as they will go out of alignment. Just clean the glass on the RF and blow a little air on the rest.
 
I use a Q-tip w/ a little Windex to clean the RF glass inside. You might have to do it several times to get all the dirt and grime off. DON'T touch the glass w/ the beamsplitter!

Bill






Rigby said:
I recently bought a RC off of eBay and it seems to work well except it's a little on the 'crusty' side and as such the viewfinder and rangefinder square is a bit dirty which makes focusing (particularly in low light) a bit tricky. Short of sending it to be serviced, is there some sort of easy fix to clean it up or make it easier to focus? I suppose I could use the distance on the focusing wheel to estimate.

I'm not terribly keen on opening it up and will only do it as a last resort. I'm really not good at doing fiddly things and I'd hate to break it! 😛

Thanks.
Click to expand...
 
Ditto on the don't touch the mirrors advice—the reason is that RF mirrors are front-silvered, which means you can easily de-silver the mirrors if you scrub too hard. :|
 
Well...I have cleaned foggy beamsplitter, not hundreds of times, but just several. Did it because otherwise I don't get clear'n'crispy finder which makes me to use this cameras again and again.

There's a point HOW to clean BS glass - I used photo glass cleaning tissue (gentle cleaning paper soaked with some fluid). Well, I did it extremely gently. If that touch would take silvering off, it would fall apart untouched just when carrying camera with me. If fluid would react with silvering, I'd loose cheap camera and learn not use tissues.

Note on cotton buds - I avoid them on glass. Because some of them contain harder particles (they aren't visible normally) which scratch glass. So I never ever anymore will use them to clean glass on cameras. There's cleaning paper/tissues or hundred-times-washed cotton pajama.
And big blue rubber bulb to start with 🙂
 
If the outside of your VF windows are plastic and scratched or clouded, you can use Polywatch (a product made for watch crystals) to remove the sctratches.
 
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