Thanks Ron, you know I love the animals.......
Win for me this weekend. I bought my sister a 50mm 1.8 Nikkor so she'd have a decent low-light lens,
and for fun, I picked up this lens for me.....
It was $20, and the aperture was stuck. Now I do not have a very great history of taking things apart and
putting them back together, but over time, I have had a few victories on stuck mechanisms on old tape
decks and such that did not require anything but some jiggling and maybe a little dis-assembly. Problem is,
these lenses are pretty complex inside, so I REALLY figured I would most likely destroy it, giving me a few
lenses to burn ants with, and if I got it to work, I would have a cheap 70-300 to carry around when I didn't
want to get something better ruined. On the day it was delivered to work, I tried to take it apart and found
I needed a finer screwdriver than I had here once I got past the mount.
So on Friday after work, I took it further apart, and got the aperture unstuck, put it back together and took it out
for a quick test shoot. Halfway down the greenway, the thing looked like it was gonna break in half. I got it home
and took it down again, this time a little further. Apparently the previous owner had tried to fix it, and couldn't,
but half re-assembled it for a quick sale to the used dept. There were three screws that were loose inside. I tightened
them up and put it all back together and it worked fine. It has a REALLY nice macro feature with 4 settings, it is a
so-so focuser speed-wise, but for the most part is sharp enough. While it is extremely cheap in overall build quality,
I bet it is worth $100-$125 new, so I septupled it's value, lol. I am not going to buy any more beat lenses, although
I did want to try and de-fungus a short prime instead of this one, but that prime 50mm was 60 bucks. Not worth trying that.
I like a $20 project much more.