Kaimusailing

The weather continued to blast us with cold and then rain. It was time to get the boat ready to head south. Additional propane cylinders were filled and stowed on deck. The Coleman on demand hot water heater was tried out and it produced a large flame coming from within. It did heat water, but I was afraid it couldn't be used down below decks. Maybe not even up topside. The propane catalytic heater ran fine and would do well to heat the pilothouse.
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The newly purchased 3000 watt generator refused to run, but it did run about a month ago when I bought it, so I bough some starter fluid and it fired up on first pull. I ran it with 1200 watts of flood lights hooked up and ran it dry to burn up the old gas. Then I began working on the smaller two stroke generator that I had used when at anchor. It had stopped running. It did not respond to starter spray and a check of the spark plug showed it was firing. This little generator is the second 2 stroke 800 watt generators that I've used. The first one had multiple problems. The rope starter failed and eventually it refused to run. It was discarded. This one will be also.
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I was still waiting on camera parts for the Canon 30D bought online. A Minolta lens adapter came in, but it only mechanically adapts the lens, the change in focal length makes the standard lens only useful for very close up macro shots. The 200 mm telephoto zoom is only good at about 20 to 40 feet. A second adapter was ordered that has corrective optics to allow par-focal zoom. A parts only Minolta zoom was ordered as a small repair project.
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I had on hand the standard Minolta 45mm f2 lens, a Rokinon 28mm f2.8 lens, and a manual focus generic 80-200 telephoto zoom which had a loose focus grip, that is, the cylinder of the lens that has focal length markings and serrated surface was loose from the actual lens cylinder. It zoomed and focused fine. The Rokinon 28mm aperture was frozen, it was always wide open. After reading an online article about fixing frozen iris I decided to give it a shot.
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The article said it's an easy fix for most lenses and a good way to get a lens cheap. That is why I bought the parts only Minolta zoom for about 20 bucks, free shipping. The Rokinon 28mm had lots of little screws holding it together and a cheap orange screwdriver kit from Harbor Freight, I think it was about $3.99, fit the JIS screws perfectly. After taking most of the lens apart I was down to the iris assembly shown in the picture. The view is from the objective side.
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The iris was flooded with isopropyl alcohol and excess swabbed up with q-tips and paper towels. This lens is available used for about $50, not a hundreds and hundreds of dollars Zeiss, so I was not concerned if the repair took a turn for the worse. If that happened I could buy a nice Canon EF auto focus lens with image stabilization for about $150. There were 2 on eBay covering zoom range from 55 to 300 mm for a total of $180.
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After drying out the alcohol, the iris now operated smoothly and it was time to reassemble the lens. The aperture adjustment ring had to be aligned with the aperture assembly along with a stop-down aperture assembly. There is a notch in the adjustment ring for the internal washer-like link and the link had a fork to engage the aperture assembly lever. The aperture assembly can only be mounted on the lens barrel one way and has dogs that keep it inline with the lens barrel as it moves in and out during focusing. The focus barrel has coarse left hand threads inside the lens barrel and when it is rotated, it moves in and out to focus. The objective lens group mounts in the end of the focus barrel with set screws to secure the focus ring and the final piece is the ornamental ring with lens ID, “made in Japan”, etc.
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This simple job of cleaning and reassembly took about 10 hours of trial and error. We do not have a repair guide for this lens, so a lot of “chair time” was spent in between snafus to figure it out. It's like a cylindrical Rubik's cube. Those Canon EF-S auto focus lenses are starting to look better. Hmm.