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Homemade Toy Lens

Tips and Tricks
Posted by Bengt Köhler Sandberg 2012-08-12

I have got quite a lot of questions about my homemade lenses and its about time I write something about them.

There are not made from scratch and I have taken lenses elements and things I have found in other products and then glued them in a lenshousing.
And I have made a few of these throughout the years.

First one I made have one lens element that I took from a binocular and the lens housing was originally made from plumber tubing and it looked very professional.

But found a broken Nikon 100mm Series E lens which I took out all the lens elements from and glued in binocular lens.

This lens is supprisingly sharp in the middle and gets very blurry at the corners but that what you get when you only use one lens element.

Second one is a lens that if I don't remember wrong came from the little lens you find on a medium format chimney viewfinder.
My widest single element lens and it's about 35mm.
Plastic element that are very soft and only got some detail in the very middle.
This also had a plastic tubing for camera housing at first but remade it with a housing from a pentacon 50mm.
It was not that easy to remove the lens element out of this so I ended up using a hammer and screwdriver to do the job.

The third must be one of the world's most expensive toy lens because it's made from a
Carl Zeiss Jena DDR Flektogon 35mm f/2.4 (m42).
And it was a nice working lens before I got it.
But it's like breaking a rock someone might think.
Yes but you can break a rock if you really want to, might take some violence but it can be done and let's just leave it to that.

But instead of just throwing it in the bin I thought I try to experiment to rearrange the lenses and see what it might do.
So I ended up completely removing the front element and flipping another so it faces the wrong way.
This made the lens to do everything the manufacturer try to avoid at all cost.

The lower and focusing part is from another lens which I don't remember the name of, the second half is of the Zeiss lens which is glued together.
Ended up to be a good looking lens if I say so myself.
At least if you compare it to my other homemade toy lenses and you don't look to close.

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