35mm pre-asph summicron - loose front section.

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I have a 35mm pre-asph. Summicron, latest type, bought new in about 1994. The front section, including the aperture ring but not the focusing ring, is now very loose. There's about 1mm up-down play, it rattles quite a lot, and is clearly not right. I think it's been happening over a number of years, but I didn't really notice until its play accelerated. Has anyone else experienced this? What did it take to fix it?

-- Robin Barnsley (Oxford, England) (rb@jet.uk), February 11, 2002

Answers

Hi Robin

Inside there a some screws that hold the lens together. Due to vibration (or not fixed enough at production) these sometime get loose. I had something similar with my Telyt 250. The only thing you can do is to send it to the Leica representative in the UK to open it and fix everything in there. Not very cheap though, I payed 110 euro (inc shipping, handling and tax). (My expirience is that independant repair centres will not touch a Leica lens. One said to me that he didn't risc it because they are too expensive to replace when something goes wrong.)

It can be worthwhile to ship it yourself, rather than having a local shop send it and demand a extra handling fee and cause extra delay. I had my lens back after one and a half week.

Reinier

-- ReinierV (rvlaam@xs4all.nl), February 11, 2002.


Or you could use this place:

http://www.angelfire.com/biz/Leica/page8.html

-- John Collier (jbcollier@powersurfr.com), February 11, 2002.


This appears to be a common problem with these lenses. The sections are glued together and if the lens is unmounted by turning the front of the lens (with or without the shade), the two parts come loose. The solution is to send it to a qualified Leica repair person/station to have it correctly repaired.

In the future, never use anything but the base of the lens to attach/detach it.

-- Bud (budcook@attglobal.net), February 11, 2002.


I have the same problem with a 40/2 Summicron from my CL - most annoying.

-- pete (Leica_RF@yahoo.com), February 11, 2002.

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