Tagged with fix - Personal View Talks

Lx100 internal dust

RoadsidePicnic — Thu, 05 Mar 2020 22:59:34 +0000

After some years of abuse my Lx100 got a hanful of internal dust spots.

Have any of you ever solved that problem withou taking the camera completely apart? Theres any way to do it with a vacuum cleaner and minimal intrusion?

GH3 Loose Hot Shoe (pictures)

djhessler — Tue, 16 Jul 2013 14:43:02 +0000

I know there is a topic on this already, but Vitally please leave a thread for this, it's very important. As everyone knows already, the hotshoe becomes loose on the GH3, the sad news is that the screws come completely off. This weekend on a trip to San Francisco my hot shoe became really loose I had 2 wireless transmitters on it, so this morning I decided to open my gh3, yes I know very stupid!!!!!!!! Do not do this!!!!! it's not easy to do this and parts can easy break. After opening the camera I discovered that taking out the viewfinder is not easy, one bolt is blocked by the board and taking out the board was a bit too much for me, so there is one particular bolt that stayed out, yes .... I did not put it back because it is too difficult to put it back in without pulling out the board, so back to the hot shoe, the hot shoe seems to be screwed by two bolts on each side, incredibly both bolts came off, and the sad news is that one is probably inside my camera moving around because I only found one :-( so what I did is that I used a bolt from the outside of the body and put back two bolts on the hot shoe, but another sad thing I discovered is that this part of the camera is really weak, I honestly cannot see that much metal around here so my advice to people is: Do not put anything too heavy on there. Another sad thing is that yes the bolts that hold the hotshoe do not have locktite so that is why they come off so easily, all these small screws are not tight too much because if tightened too much they give out. Honestly it's sad to see such expensive camera made so flimsy in the inside, I have 2 GH3 and I hope they last me a good time cause I paid premium for these cams. The first picture has a red circle around the area where both bolts came off.

When pulling out the back plate, I broke a part of the chasis, I think I was suppose to take out the dial and take a screw out from there, so be aware if you simply pull the back as I did, you will brake this part too. The camera is back together and working, I tested it and all seems to be ok even though I did break some parts :-(

So there you have it guys, these hot shoes will come loose eventually unless panny fixed the issued on a different batch, I bought mine in November of 2012.

See pictures bellow.

Manual lens rebuilding

svart — Mon, 02 May 2011 15:53:54 +0000

Since this is a forum that is more about technical issues and I think the members are more interested in the inner workings of things, I wanted to share some information about lens rebuilding/cleaning.

Rebuilding/cleaning lenses is not a simple thing to do. The work is physically easy but any small slip up can render the lens unusable. Also, in most lenses if you take the helicals apart and then attempt to put them back together later, the helicals will line up a hundred different ways but only one way will be right. IF you take the helicals apart, be VERY sure that you have marked them somehow or you'll be in for a hard time.

I have been building up a set of manual nikon lenses, primarily AI series lenses. I've been buying cheap lenses that usually have stuck focuses since this is really an easy way to get lenses for less than premium price, as long as you can work on them. This isn't without potential issues as a lot of sellers will tell you the obvious problems but either won't know all of the details or they just won't tell you all the details. Some lenses have even been taken apart previously and put together wrong.. In short, there might be more problems with these lenses than you know about, so be prepared.

Anyway, I can't go into detail about how to rebuild a lens since each lens is different and might need different work done but I can share some of the issues I had.

One of the issues was re-greasing the lens helicals. Tons of websites and forums claim to have the magic formulas for helical grease or they'll tell you that some strange brand works the best. Some sell you tiny little amounts of grease for lots of money while others mention greases that haven't been available for decades.

I've tried a lot of different greases and here's what I found:

Forget any organic grease.

Anything marked NLGI 2 is going to be too thick. This includes pretty much any of the "bicycle" or automobile greases that are touted on a lot of lens websites. They make the lenses feel solid but focusing takes considerable force which may cause the lens to "bob" back and forth while focusing(also known as lens breathing) and/or shift in the mounts. Both of which ruin shots.

NLGI 1 is better but some of the greases are sticky while some are more jelly-like and offer very little metal-to-metal protection. Most of these are made to grease plastic gears or O-rings. A lot of these greases are PAO based oils with thickeners to make them more grease-like.

PAOs are the base chemicals for synthetic oils like Mobil 1 automobile oils. They tend to stick to metals pretty well and they never separate under heat and pressure like organic oils.

Many of the websites I read said nothing about using oils and the few that did said never to use oils. They never specified what kind or even if they had tried it. I found that synthetic motor oil felt the best and offered the most metal-to-metal protection in the helicals. I even performed a test where I heated the lens helicals up to see if the oil would run out. It did not, generally because synthetic oils actually thicken up slightly when heated.

I wanted a PAO based oil with a sticky property that had PTFE(teflon). I found Super Lube 51004. It's a high viscosity PAO based oil with PTFE. a few small dabs of oil on the helicals and the lenses move smoothly and easily with no "whispering" that you get with metal/metal contact. Just don't use too much, a small amount is all that is needed.

a6300: Passive Cooling Idea to fix Overheating issue

fatpig — Wed, 26 Oct 2016 03:33:18 +0000

Did anyone try this? I Just had this idea. Just sandwich a thermal pad between the a6300 and the battery grip, using the pressure to transfer the body heat to the pad, which in turn dissipates the heat through some small ram heatsinks. I think this might actually work. Removable, silent, cool. Does anyone have the stuff lying around to try it? :)

How to fix Manfrotto Magic Arm

inqb8tr — Wed, 12 Feb 2014 03:34:37 +0000

Great useful video :) My magic arm is broken for 2 years, and when I searched how to fix it, this came up!

GH3 LCD hinge cover fix

konjow — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 16:57:29 +0000

Upss.. Drop.. Looks like nothing is broken yet... seems to be easy to broke if I try to push in and probably easy fix if know how. There is a piece of magnet which hold this piece but i don't want to force it to break this plastic cover. Any advices what to do or more important what not to do....? Except sending to panasonic of course. I fill like little boy with injured, dying pet :) I know its a punishment for selling Gh2.

Banding - Avoiding It and Fixing It - Current Consensus

matt_gh2 — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 02:00:50 +0000

I've had some banding issues on my GH2- not a lot, but sometimes, so I was searching through the site to try to figure out how to avoid it (or minimize it) when shooting, and also how to fix it in post if you need to. I was hoping to see if anyone basically knew the definitive current consensus, but hadn't seen too much on how to avoid it. I also saw a few proposed solutions (convert to 5DtoRGB, apply dithering/noise, add a second layer that's blurred), but there was some debate, so was hoping to see what people have found works for them when it comes to avoiding and fixing banding. Thank you

How-to: Fix lens to adapter looseness

svart — Wed, 04 May 2011 14:07:31 +0000

So I figured out a way to get rid of the looseness between lenses and their adapters. Since most of us use still lenses that tend to fit a little loose in their mounts and then wiggle and move when focused. This can cause the frame to shift slightly and it's very noticeable when rack focusing. I found very thin adhesive PTFE(teflon) sheets that can be cut out to the same shape as the mounting face and used to shim the lens to make a tight fit. I just cut out a piece large enough to cover the face of the mount and then trimmed the PTFE to the OD and ID of the mount face. Teflon is of course very slick and has a bit of pliability to it so that it won't mar the mounting surface of your lens. In any case, I make no warranty about this so do it at your own risk. :)

What I used was .005(PN 2208T21) and .01(PN 2208T111) thick sheets of adhesive PTFE from McMaster-Carr supply:
www.mcmaster.com

I'm not sure where you can get sheets of adhesive PTFE in other countries though. I assume there are industrial supply companies that have raw materials like this.

I'll get some pictures of them up soon.