Daren Sefcik: Tokina AT-X 35mm-200mm Fungus Repair

Monday, August 19, 2013

Tokina AT-X 35mm-200mm Fungus Repair

In my box of newly donated camera gear I had a couple of lenses that were suffering from fungus and oil. One was a Tokina AT-X 35mm-200mm zoom lens. It had extensive fungus on the internal lens and I figured it did me no good as is so I took it apart and cleaned it up. This was a manual focus lens for the Olympus OM mount cameras.

I forgot to take a picture of the lens before I started working on it but it was similar to this (I found on the Internet)

Here is the patient

The first step is to remove the outside lens retainer ring set screw. Unscrew this just a a turn or two so you can unscrew the main Tokina lens ring. If you unscrew it all the way out I wish you luck getting it back in if you have bad eyes.

Next remove the 3 screws holding the outer lens in place

Shake or pop that thing out of the lens until you get this

Now remove the 3 screws that hold the inner lens in place

After I removed the screws I needed to unscrew the whole lens assembly, I was able to do this by hand. There are some spanner tool slots you can use if you have a spanner tool

Here is the internal lens removed. The inside of this lens is where most of the fungus was

I used PEC Pads and cleaner to clean all of the lens elements and a hand blower to get any dust/hairs off of the lenses. It seemed to work out well. Here are some photos from the lens after cleaning. These are all straight from the photo lab, I did not do any PP on them.

Tokina AT-X 35mm-200mm / Olympus OM-1n / Fujifilm color negative ISO 200 several years old expired film.

Rose garden at my house

Macro mode of the lens, only a couple of inches away

Macro mode of the lens, just a few inches away

More roses

This is a tape measure focus shot. I measured with a tape measure the distance and used the focus ring to match, seemed to work pretty good. I did not use the viewfinder to focus.