Cleaning fungus off lenses

Layer-cake · Joined: 18 Mar 2013 Posts: 560 Location: Cape Town

I've cleaned quite a few lenses in my time but I have managed to buy a Yashica Nicca 55mm 1.8 lens but there are some small specs of fungus on the inner lenses, I should be OK with dissembling the lens but due to the cost of these lenses I want to make make sure I am not going to damage the lenses when cleaning them.

Normally I use toothpaste to clean the lenses as it works really well but again as the lens is worth quite a bit I want to see if anyone has a better solution for me to use on the lens to help clean the elements off.

calvin83 · Joined: 12 Apr 2009 Posts: 7573 Location: Hong Kong

Read the sticky thread!
http://forum.mflenses.com/take-care-when-cleaning-lens-from-fungus-t6442.html

Layer-cake · Joined: 18 Mar 2013 Posts: 560 Location: Cape Town

Thanks Calvin, I did have a read through this before.

I've tried using Naphta and some other alcohol based solutions in the past but never got the fungus off the lenses and then I read on a post somewhere about using facial cream and toothpaste which has worked really well for me in the past but as it is basically an abrasive I'm a bit worried that I will damage the lenses.

The lenses seem quite soft as there are some light cleaning marks already on the front element and I don't want to damage this lens in the slightest way.

calvin83 · Joined: 12 Apr 2009 Posts: 7573 Location: Hong Kong

Also read this http://www.biofos.com/cornucop/fungus.html . From my experience, most fungus are pretty easy to be wipe off with vinegar but etched coating are non-recoverable.

Excalibur · Expire: 2014-04-21

Well it's worth mentioning in case you damage your lens.... cleaning or re-assembling incorrectly that a few spots of fungus wont make any difference to the quality of your shots and if you keep the camera in a dry place it wont get worse and without water (damp) can't live and do any further damage. Anyway fungus doesn't bother me and my lenses that have fungus are amongst the clean ones as the spores are everywhere anyway so see no point in separating them.

Layer-cake · Joined: 18 Mar 2013 Posts: 560 Location: Cape Town

I do agree with you a bit of fungus isn't going to completely destroy the image quality of a lens, haze is a lot worse IMO horrible stuff and very difficult to remove.

well I went ahead and worked on the rear element and I'm happy to say its back to almost original condition, the small bits of fungus must have been relatively fresh as it hadn't etched into the coating at all (I'm very relieved about that;)

my lens ring tool isn't wide enough to remove the retaining ring for the front element so I have a bit of a mission ahead of me to get that off.

Lloydy · Expire: 2022-01-01

Cold cream works for me, but once the etching has taken hold nothing will remove the marks.

Layer-cake · Joined: 18 Mar 2013 Posts: 560 Location: Cape Town