Tamron Adaptall 2 80-210 03A CF Tele Macro

adonuff · Joined: 24 Nov 2017 Posts: 64

Hi
I recently purchased this lens, The zoom is very hard to use & the focus ring will not turn at all. I'm thinking broken. Unless there is some form of a lock or its in macro mode. Just in case I am missing something obvious I thought better ask if anyone here has experience with this lens. Is it worth repairing, if so how complicated. It may be something as simple as a loose screw inside, like I found in one of my Topcon's.

If they are reasonably easy to dismantle I would like to give it a go rather than go to the trouble of returning to the seller, needs the internal dust removed anyway.

Your thoughts?

Thanks Andrew

DConvert · Joined: 12 Jun 2010 Posts: 902 Location: Essex UK

The 03A is apparently very similar to the 103A which replaced it.
I have several of these, but haven't tried stripping them yet.

I would expect it to be a tricky repair, not worth the effort unless you fancy the challenge.
If the lens was relatively cheap & came with a useful adaptall 2 mount, I'd keep it for the mount and have a go with the lens as a learning exercise. If the damage wasn't listed by the seller you should be able to get a significant refund as well!

FWIW the typical sale price of the 103A is £5-£15 without the mount, so I'd expect the value of a seized one to be next to nothing (less than the postage to return it).

adonuff · Joined: 24 Nov 2017 Posts: 64

Thanks for that, the answer I was expecting, the really annoying thing was that I purchase an adaptor to fit the Pentax mount on the Tamron to my Sony. Then again I can now look at Pentax lenses. So not a total disaster. I think I will most likely keep it & have a go at fixing. Only cost me $40.00 not a huge loss.

Lloydy · Expire: 2022-01-01

I had a Tamron 28-135 one touch zoom that jammed solid - so jammed that I couldn't dismantle it.

The focus / zoom sleeve would not come off in the normal way even after I had removed all the screws. In the end I used a hacksaw to destroy the sleeve just to see what the fault was. And I was forceful with it before I resorted to the hacksaw.

Inside the sleeve there are tiny nylon rollers that are held in place with screws, the rollers guide the focus / zoom mechanism along slots. One roller had come off and had gone under the sleeve with the slots where it lodged in place and stopped all movement. Even though the detached roller had fallen deeper inside the lens mechanism it jammed every moving part of the focus / zoom mechanism.

Shame, it was a nice lens that jammed within hours of buying it.

cooltouch · Joined: 15 Jan 2009 Posts: 9097 Location: Houston, Texas

I have a Tamron 03A I tried to dismantle and wasn't very successful. I started by attempting to remove the front elemen(s). What I found was, in my copy, the retaining ring was extremely tight. I even slipped with my spanner, and put a scratch in the front element. Eventually I got it loose, only to find that the front element is an extremely thin piece of glass and immediately underneath it was another retaining ring that was even tighter. I gave up in frustration.

About those nylon rollers: these are common parts with other zoom lenses. I have dismantled a couple of Vivitar S1 zooms: a 28-90 and a 28-105. What I found out about these lenses, and it might apply to the Tamron, was that they tend to strip out of the barrels that hold them in place very easily. With both my Vivitar S1 zooms, they stripped out because of the way I handled the lenses.

Both zooms are push-pull zooms and the zoom action was stiff with both of them. So, hoping to loosen them up some, I started pushing and pulling on the zoom collar, and got fairly aggressive with them, pushing and pulling faster and harder, hoping to loosen them up. Not too long after doing this, I noticed that both of them started behaving abnormally. So I opened them up. First the 28-90, then the 28-105. With the 28-90, I saw that I'd stripped out a couple of the nylon rollers. I had rendered the zoom unrepairable. So I opened up the 28-105. Same thing, I'd stripped out a couple of the nylon rollers. Both lenses had become junk. I'm saving both now for parts, should I ever need any. Ever since ruining these two lenses, I have been much more careful when I operate the zoom collar with push-pull zooms.

Your 03a may have suffered from this same problem. At any rate, it will require a complete dismantling in order to find out why you're having this problem.