Taking apart and servicing a Voigtländer Color-Ultron 50/1,8

[rawhead]

Hello, one more post for me today.

Has anyone done this?

I've taken apart and successfully serviced the Rollei QBM version of this lens, and thought that it would be the same for the M42 version. How wrong I was. I could take the back mount off and get at just a little bit of the insides. But I couldn't find a way to take out the front element (the ring that usually screws off with a rubber tool actually doesn't look like it will screw off; the threads don't go down that far) and the rear element...


Well, take a look:






As you can see, nowhere to "catch" the ring that holds the rear element in place! I tried to get at it from the side, but no-go. In fact, if you look at the rear element, there's one big scratch I made near the edge trying to do this. Yes, I was depressed for the next couple of hours. The scratch is bad enough to show in near-focus bokeh circles.


Beside the point.



The point is, I can't think of a way to unscrew this ring. There is one small speck of what I think is fungus that is growing inside; I'd love to get to it before it has a chance to spread. Regarding the scratch, I'm thinking about snatching the QBM version of the lens (which go for so much cheaper) and seeing if I could swap the rear element; I would still need to unscrew this ring to even try that.


Any help would be oh so much appreciated. This is my favority 50mm lens. Thanks!

[Gabriel]

It might be easier to remove the rear ring once you removed the m42 mount. As for the front element, it's not just the name ring but the whole front part that you have to unscrew.

If you Google for "50 1.8 planar m42 servicing", you'll find a bit of help.

btw: are there tricks to post URLs within this forum? When I tried to post the relevant page for the upper mentioned search, it properly appears within my post preview, but not in the real post.