[Leica] Spider smear update

[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