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The guy who runs the pawn shop on 8th showed me his CLA trick and I'm still not sure about it
I was in there last Tuesday picking up a beat up Pentax K1000 for $40 when he mentioned he cleans every lens he sells with plain dish soap and warm water. He said he has been doing it 20 years and never lost a coating, which goes against everything I was taught about solvents and lens tissue. What got me was when he pulled out a 50mm that looked perfect and said a customer returned it twice for haze before he started doing this. I tried it on a junk lens from a box of parts and it came out fine, but I keep waiting for the coating to lift on me. Has anyone here actually tested soap and water on a coated element long term?
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robert65918d ago
The soap itself isn't what's doing the work there, it's the fact that he's using it in warm water and rinsing it all off right away. Plain Dawn or whatever won't strip a modern hard coating, sure, but a lot of those old Pentax Takumars and even some K mount glass have softer coatings that can go cloudy over time from repeated exposure to alkaline stuff. What probably saved his hide is that he's not scrubbing, just dunking and rinsing, and he's not letting it sit. The haze he was fighting was likely fungus or old lube offgassing, and plain water alone would've knocked most of that back anyway. Try that same trick on a 60s Leica or a Canon FL lens with a soft coating and you might get a different result.
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