Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/06/20

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Subject: [Leica] cleaning a LS-2000 isn't that hard
From: "Birkey" <dbirkey@uio.telconet.net>
Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 13:40:58 -0500

For the last couple of weeks I've been really frustrated with some of the
scans I've been doing with the LS-2000... I've been scanning a bunch of old
slides and sort of figured the reason the quality stunk was..... well....
they were old slides....

Yesterday I scanned some new slides and realized that something else wasn't
right... or I had shot them with my EOS and maybe it was some flare that
snuck onto the slides from the zoom lens or that UV filter on the front
 : - )

Anyhow, this morning, I figured how hard can it be to clean the LS-2000....
So armed with a small screwdriver, a visegrips, Q-tips and Kodak Lens
cleaning fluid I attempted it for myself.....

OK, if you are wondering what the visegrips was for..... Nikon has one of
the 4 screws on the back sort of sealed with some variation of locktight...
and the only way I could loosen the screw was to put the visegrips on the
screwdriver.  The other 3 came out quickly......

Once inside, I brought a monolight with a reflector to allow me to see the
mirror and lens..... horror of horrors.... it looked really bad and both the
lens and mirror were really dirty...   after figuring out how I was going to
get the Qtip inside and do finger contortions to clean it..... I put more or
less 5 drops of fluid on the q tip and wiped across once, turning it so
there was always a clean section of the qtip touching the mirror....
switched ends or a new q-tip and repeated this until I had cleaned the whole
mirror and lens....  and then went back again as needed, making sure there
was no cotton lint around... closed it back up and could not believe how
much difference it made in the scans.....

Needless to say....  I have a whole bunch of scans to redo......
ARHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!

But it was really quite easy as I only removed 4 screws (for the cover,
located on the back) , with a few q-tips, lens fluid and 1/2 of time....I've
got essentially a new scanner again....

Duane Birkey
HCJB World Radio, Quito Ecuador
Duane's Photographs of Ecuador:
http://ecuadorphotos.tripod.com

Replies: Reply from "Mxsmanic" <mxsmanic@hotmail.com> (Re: [Leica] cleaning a LS-2000 isn't that hard)