[Leica] Spider smear update

Jayanand Govindaraj jayanand at gmail.com
Sat Sep 10 09:46:44 PDT 2022


Excellent.

Jugaad in all its glory! 

Cheers
Jayanand

Sent from my iPad

> On 10-Sep-2022, at 21:45, Howard L Ritter Jr via LUG <lug at leica-users.org> wrote:
> 
> 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
> 
> 
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