WTB: Knackered prime lenses.

With the amount of people owning old lenses on here, I was wondering if anyone has any lenses with seized aperture rings or stiff focusing that they never use and want to find a new home for? Although I'm now using a Sony camera for IR (I would have converted a K-01 if it took an EVF), I find Pentax prime lenses generally work very well with an adaptor. My 15mm Ltd is used more for IR than anything else.

Infinity focus in IR is quite difficult to get right all the time with aerial photography, as I generally don't have the time to fiddle about getting it spot on. Focus peaking doesn't work at altitude unless there's ridges or other strong lines in the image, which has been a bit of a disappointment. I also want to try photographing thunderstorms at night in IR, when I can't see anything to focus on. So, to get to the point, I'd like to find a few old lenses that I can glue at infinity focus for my IR camera. I'm interested in any prime lens between 24mm- 135mm. I just can't bring myself to squirt super-glue on an otherwise good lens, even though I have a couple I got relatively cheaply that I've thought about using. In fact I actually had the glue out one day and the poor lens screamed NO! at me, so I put it back in the cupboard.

I'm happy to pay for any damaged lenses, though obviously not very much, and the lenses would get a new, albeit unusual, lease of life. I'm only interested in lenses that are not damaged (ie optically OK) apart from either a seized aperture ring or stiff focusing, although the general cosmetic appearance does not matter at all. Any offers?

What about a A series 28-80 Macro f3.5-4.5?

Optically it looks fine, cosmetically, fine, but the focussing is a little loose rather than stiff!

Why not just switch to MF and use tape to fix the focusing on infinity?

Needs to be prime lenses, infinity focus in IR varies a huge amount through the zoom range. I don't want the bulk of a zoom stuck at one focal length.

I've tried that with my smc-A 50mm f1.4 twice, John, and both times must have nudged it a touch applying the tape, and the focus was off. I'll try again though. Of course it then means the lens is not usable on my K5 until I remove the tape, which is why I'd prefer to have two of each lens. As I only need infinity focus I thought a cheap option would be to buy some damaged lenses and permanently modify them.

And you could have had this one for £10 including delivery!

I am loathe to dump it ... but one day someone might be able to use it.

Bump....

A forum member has come up with a Pentax 50mm, I'm still looking for other focal lengths. No one else with some faulty old primes they want to get rid of?

Have an old Helios you can have for a pint and postage
Send me a pm.

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