[Leica] Spider smear update

[hlritter at bex.net (Howard L Ritter Jr)]

So here?s how the Spider Saga has played out.

I bought a sensor-cleaning kit from Amazon consisting of individually 
hermetically-sealed-in-a-clean-room swabs that look like little solid brooms 
as wide as the height of a FF sensor plus a dropper bottle of cosmically 
pure water that costs more per ml than Lagavullin. (The kit?s from Canada, 
so it starts out with street cred.) But I thought that something more than 
water would do a better job of getting this organic crud off. The lens wipes 
made by Zeiss are just right for this job. They?re little rectangles of 
folded-up lintfree paper saturated with isopropyl alcohol, and their folded 
size is almost exactly the same as that of the sensor, the mirror, and the 
focusing screen.

To start, I used the air bulb to blow the desiccated spider body and the one 
visible leg out. Then I placed one of the folded wipes on the sensor and let 
it sit for about a minute, gently moving it around. I removed it with 
tweezers, then used the lens swab moistened with water to wipe the residue 
off. I repeated the process with water alone and the sensor cleaned up very 
nicely. 

Then I noticed a smear on the focusing screen, apparently where the critter 
had been mashed against it when the mirror cycled, so I turned the camera 
upside down and put a folded-up wipe on the focusing screen and locked the 
mirror up to hold the wipe between the two. I let that sit for a minute and 
then lowered the mirror again. I finished off with water and a fresh sensor 
swab on both the screen and the mirror, and everything looks factory fresh 
now.

With a little trepidation, I fired the shutter a few times to see whether 
there was spider-stuff on the curtain that would rub off on the sensor 
again, likely necessitating a trip to Nikon. Happy to say, didn?t happen.

Plus, now I have 8 remaining swabs and most of a bottle of Lagavullin water 
for the next time the sensor gets dirty. I love happy endings! 

?howard