Repair front glass of the lens, possible?

B

bernt

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I am considering buying a Rolleiflex 2.8E which needs a bit more than a general CLA. Its front lens has a one millimeter damage in the glass.
Do any of you know about someone doing lens glass repair? Or maybe someone who can change the whole lens?
The camera would not cost me a lot, so I am ready to pay a bit for such a repair.
Any idea?
 
If you mean that there's a 1mm scratch, but the rest of the glass is good, there's an old, cheap repair you can do yourself. With a very fine brush and some matte black (camera blacking) paint, fill in the scratch. The effect thereafter will be negligible. It's hard to believe, but true.

To answer the question you actually asked, yes, the front glass can be replaced but it will cost you far more than you pay for the camera.

Cheers,

R.
 
For a Rollieflex I think black India ink would be the traditional scratch filler, but not many people use ink anymore. As Roger has said, such a small scratch shouldn't make any difference to the image quality. Filling in the scratch with paint or ink neutralizes that tiny bit of the lens and stops stray light bouncing around.

Steve
 
Thank you Roger Hicks and 250swb! It is not a 1mm long scratch, it is more like a circular damage going a bit deeper. The owner says it creates reflections only when shooting backlight, otherwise it has no effect.
Since the shutter also needs to be cleaned (it is slow on long speeds) I would like to find a person in the US or in Europe who can do CLA and also repair the lens. Maybe I can fix the lens myself with ink as you propose, however I would like to get a professional to do it.
I would be happy if I could find someone. Do you have a suggestion?
 
Even a 1 mm 'dent' is extremely unlikely to matter, and really, a true repair to Zeiss or Schneider standards (new glass, recollimation) is going to be unbelievably expensive. Either go for the Indian ink/paint, or forget about the camera.

Cheers,

R.
 
Polishing the scratch out will be extremely expensive. Literally hundreds of dollars. The camera would almost have to be a "gimme" to make it worth doing.
There's someone here in the US that will do it . Don't remember who though.
Photography on bald mountain maybe?
 
If it's any help, India ink is a mix of lamp-black (the black stuff that builds up in a gas-flue), water and gum-arabic. The gum-arabic can be replaced with shellac and methyl-alcohol if that's easier
 
Landshark said:
Polishing the scratch out will be extremely expensive. Literally hundreds of dollars. The camera would almost have to be a "gimme" to make it worth doing.
There's someone here in the US that will do it . Don't remember who though.
Photography on bald mountain maybe?
Click to expand...

This isn't just repolishing: it's regrinding, and the performance of the lens is likely to be significantly compromised by doing so, because the lens will be significantly thinner.

Think of it as:

Strip. Separate front elements (a doublet on any f/2.8 Rollei, as far as I recall, but I could be wrong). Regrind and recoat, or replace. Re-cement frint glasses. Recollimate. Reassemble.

Of course, a professional repairer may be willing to do the Indian ink trick.

Cheers,

R.
 
A few years back a friend returned to me a lens I had given her, Tamron zoom for Nikon, with a 2" furrow in the outer element. Before sending it to Tamron for a new outer element, we shot a test roll at the shop, in to the sun, specular reflections, etc. --but could not really find anything in the prints.

I forgot to ask Tamron for the outer element back, I think my shop could have used it to sell UV filters. The lens had a UV, but she had gotten some fogging and had just taken it off to dry when her friend knocked the camera on to a rock.

Roger, is this something a parts camera could solve, or is the labor too much?

I have a worse damaged IIIf with a permanently collapsed Summicron? , when I find it, I will post a snap.

It is always a great time to buy lenses with marks on the barrel, user stuff is going crazy cheap at the shows I see, but there does seem to be some crazy panic pricing on Rollei's right now, a dealer paid $3K for one at auction.

To the OP, as the price today is so related to how the camera looks, the price should be so low that you are not really concerned with this defect. Shutter cleaning on these seems to be rather routine, I sometimes look for touched up marks inside the camera behind the lens where the paint was dinged when the lens was cleaned and then touched up-- at least you know it was cleaned. ;-)

Maybe some of the windshield shops can fill it with their chip repair liquids. ;-)


Regards, John
 
Last edited:
Muggins said:
Somebody was going to post this sooner or later, so it might as well be me...

Second post:

http://www.photomalaysia.com/forums/showthread.php?t=129685
(apologies if it's your picture - I know it's not the original site, but I waded through 15 pages of google images trying to find it before I went back to this on page 1).


Repair, schmepair.

Adrian
Click to expand...
Originally posted here I believe.

A one millimetre deep scratch is far deeper than the thickness of the lens coating. As Roger has already pointed out this is not just a matter of having the original coating removed by polishing and then getting it re-coated. I couldn't conceive how it would be possible to maintain any semblance of the original performance of the lens, with a one millimetre reduction in the profile of the front element.

Everything I have ever read about the production of the Rollei TLRs informs that the lens elements were supplied as a factory-matched set by Zeiss or Schneider. Witness the debacle of the Rolleiflex 2.8A Tessar model after various elements of the pre-matched lenses for them were, from what I have read, subsequently mismatched with negative consequences for image quality and the cameras reputation.

Furthermore, viewing and taking lenses were supplied as a pair with precisely matched focal lengths. So as you can see, apart from the recoating of scratches in a lens coating, any significant damage to the glass itself essentially warrants replacement of the entire lens system to restore as-new condition. Unless you happen to have a parts camera with compatible lenses in good condition, this is going to be a prohibitively expensive exercise. The viable options appear to be: walk away; acquire the camera for a price commensurate with the condition of the lenses, or; accept that that you'll have to live with the performance of the lens as it is (which may well not be as bad as one might expect-witness the link above).

Personally, I have realistic expectations of lens condition and have acquired otherwise viable cameras with some coating problems (including 2.8C & 2.8D models for which these issues are far from unknown). If a desirable Rolleiflex was in otherwise good condition but had some cleaning scratches in the lens coating, I would certainly consider buying it if the price was right, on the basis the effects may be minimal, and that the recoating option is there.

However, in view of the condition of the taking lens of this Rolleiflex as you have described it, I would not be inclined to take a punt on it myself, unless it was available at an extremely low price.
Regards,
Brett
 
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