Still digging into the FD bin for lenses to convert over, and I figured this one would be pretty straight forward. Other than being very careful with measurements (measure twice, cut/mill/turn once...), the toughest part was getting the shift leadscrew out. The endcollar lock screw on the leadscrew had a pretty strong adhesive on the threads, so the solvent of choice was MEK (be careful with that stuff...).
I started out with a backplate thickness of 5.82mm, so I milled it down to 2.50mm, and milled the M42-EOS adapter from 1.42mm to 1.20mm. The .12mm undercut ensures that infinity focus is maintained after heat/pressure bonding with J-B weld between the backplate and lens mount. Also, the joining ring and its' mount needed to be shorted (because of the thinning of the backplate). I "hexed" the joining ring and burnished both female and male threads with a SS radial brush to help reform the threads...it worked perfectly. Everything threaded fine and tightened up very snug. The original spring for the rotation detent was replaced with a re-wound ball-point pen spring, and provides the same holding force as the orginal. The M42-EOS mount has a "holding hole" for it to reside in.
Finished photos will be posted Sunday afternoon, and hopefully some shots also. Last time I used this lens was on a T90, with Kodachrome 25...got to find those slides and get them scanned.
After its put together, and if you need to fine tune infinity focus any more, the screws are under the ID ring. Its glued on so you need a "L" shaped blade to loosen lift it off.
Thanks for the kind words/comments. I figured that I would share the info here so if anyone else is "itching" to do the conversion, the photos and comments on the process should be helpful. I was checking out some other sites (Manual Focus I think), and a lot of the postings were "teaser" photos of what someone did, to drum up business. They did not answer the "how-to" questions posted as such.
Anyway, time to kick back and watch hockey, another "ExLax for the Mind" passion...
Looks like a well done conversion job. And like a very interessting lens :-)
Sometimes I think about bidding more on such a lens - but at the moment I more on the DIY tilt lens trip. Next step would probably be a tilt/shift lens out of an russian 45 mm lens for 24x36 DSLR - with better mechanics than my first tilt lenses.
I suppose crop EOS DSLR cameras with their flash would have problems with their flash housing? On one of my Rebel XT I saw this away :-)
THank you Dave, Nick, Markus, Jim, and Helimat...these conversions are fun and addictive. I need to get the right subject matter for the tilt to really shine through, not just "hey, isn't this cool". I am going to try the Kenko 1.4x DGX on it that Rich Swanner is always singing praises about. His hummingbird photos with it (or without it...) are outstanding, period.
Jim: I love the new shift lens you have posted about...a trend is starting for sure.
