Me and my Canon 50mm 1.4 lens have a love/hate relationship
If you know what a Canon 50mm 1.4 is, then you know the images it renders are beautiful. But damn, Canon had to skimp somewhere didn’t they?! This thing has a plastic inner barrel that the whole thing moves in and out on for focus. This is a known issue with this lens. Any little bump will make the focus rough due to bent plastic, and the auto-focus will get iffy because of those rough spots.
I took that sucker apart and fixed it.
But I didn’t stop there. You see, it’s a full-time-manual lens with one of those micro-motors. Since I’m mostly making movies, and don’t really use auto much, I decided to regear this thing to just be a manual lens. What!! Yep, I disabled the auto-focus. It will just spin and spin if you don’t. Makes it somewhat inaccurate if you’re trying to pull with a follow focus. Especially this lens, because if it has a rough spot due to the aforementioned problem, it will skip, and your focus marks will be off.
Not anymore baby! It rolls from one side to the other stopping on each side like a ‘real’ lens. Of course, I can still use the beep that tells me when I have focus, so all is not lost functionally. I didn’t bother taking the motor out, I just took out the little gear between the motor and the focus gear, dropped some JB Wield on the shaft of the main focus gear where the plastic gear sits on top (it only spins without the motor gear) and boom! we’re manual only.
I took some pix to make sure it was all good. I’d say we’re in business.
kwqji2xre7
October 6th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
Yep, JB Weld and Duct tape. That is what makes the redneck world go round. I have my lifetime supply out in the tool shed just waiting for that next project.