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Rebuilding a 50mm lens took me 9 hours and one tiny screw almost beat me, so who's actually right about part swaps?
Pulled apart a sticky 50mm f1.8 on my bench in Denver 3 weeks back, lost one 1.7mm screw to the carpet for 40 minutes, and it ate my entire Saturday plus two coffees. Now half the folks in my local repair circle say always hunt down the exact OEM screw, and the other half say a random parts bin screw is fine as long as the threads grab. The whole thing made me wonder if anyone has a hard rule they follow or if we're all just guessing and hoping nothing strips. What do you all do when you can't find the original part?
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river32010d ago
The 40 minute screw hunt is a rite of passage. I did the same thing with a Nikon 50mm last winter, except mine rolled into a heating vent and I had to fish it out with a magnet taped to a chopstick. Dropped screws have cost me more evenings than actual repairs at this point. On the parts question, I keep a jar of donor screws from dead lenses and match by length and thread pitch, not brand. If an OEM one turns up later I swap it back, but a hardware store screw has never stripped on me yet. The only hard rule I have is never force a screw that doesn't want to start, because that's how you wreck the threads and then you're really stuck.
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