How do you clean fungus off of a camera lens?
I'm curious if any of you have experience cleaning fungus from lenses, and what you have found that works well. I've only done this once or twice, with mixed results. I have some heavy fungus this time so I am calling the big guns with hydrogen peroxide and ammonia, which I read works well. But there's so much information out there and sometimes in contradicts what works best.
Any tips or lessons learned from experience?
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You are going to disable and reassemble a lens?
Quote from KankRat on September 10, 2022, 10:16 pmYou are going to disable and reassemble a lens?
Yes, and I've done that bit multiple times but for dust or spilled aperture oil. The times I've done it for fungus I haven't used any chemicals, just tried to clean it off but this time I'm trying this new method. We'll see how it goes!
I use just dish soap and water, I tried acetone, its good for removing oil but does not do anything more to the fungus than IPA or soap and water, I always rinse with water from my reverse osmosis system or distill water as plain tap water will leave behind residue after it dries.
do the minimum amount of disassembly you need to get to the affected elements, alignment mark everything, because putting the aperture blades back together correctly and timing the helicoid when you have no ideal how it goes together is not fun, take pictures before before you dump the aperture blades out.
I rinse with water first to get all the loose dust off, tap water is fine for this, then add a drop of dish soap on the glass and with the water trickling I very gently rub the lens element with my finger, rinse off with tap water, then a final rinse with distill or revers osmosis water, pat it down with some kimwipes and then air dry in the laminar flow hood before assemble. if you plan on doing this often get a flow hood, will keep the dust way down on the inside of the lens when you reassemble.
I am not sure about using cotton balls, maybe if its made for surgical purpose that is absolutely clean ones, not the cheap makeup cotton balls, don't know what kind of debris might be in it and could scratch your glass. I use kimwipes for all my lens and telescope cleaning. https://www.amazon.com/Professional-Kimtech-Science-Kimwipes-280/dp/B00T24KABO
just shop around on amazon, pay attention to the sizing and quantity and find the best price that will work for you. I bought this particular set about 2 years ago and i am on my last box.
I use this model flow hood https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B095WH7MB1/ but the fan that came with it is kind of weak but does the job ok, but I end up upgrading the fan to some high flow high RPM stuff and use a laptop power brick to power the fans.
if after cleaning you still see the fungus pattern on the glass its most likely that the fungus has etched the coating/glass and that is as good as it going to get.
I also did this with some of my cheaper telescopes, works good and doesn't leave scratches, but got to make sure your hands and your cleaning materials are clean before you start.
try it on some junk $5 manual lenses first and see if this works for you.
and I have attached some images of a Pentax-M 50mm F1.7 i did a little while ago.
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