May 17, 2008
The goal for this project will be to take the lens out of this cheap plastic camera and turn it into a lens for the Nikon F-mount, hopefully preseving the zoom functionality along the way.
Here we see the original packaging.
May 17, 2008
Front view of the original camera prior to liberating the lens assembly.
May 17, 2008
Side view of the camera prior to disassembly. Note the rubber boot/grip around the barrel of the lens.
I really expected the camera housing to be sonic welded together, but that wasn't the case at all. Note the two teeny tiny Phillips head screws on the side.
May 17, 2008
With the rubber boot simply slid off and a few screws removed, the front cover came right off and revealed the camera's inner workings.
May 17, 2008
The number little screws and parts was really surprising and given the way they were placed I have a hard time imaging that this thing was assembled entirely by machine. In fact, I believe the whole thing must have been assembled largely by hand. It's an astonishing amount of "stuff" for a $5 camera. Though to be fair, it was marked down form at least $10 and probably originally sold for $15 - $20. Still, even at that it's pretty amazing.
May 17, 2008
Here we see the main lens sub-assembly removed from the main camera body.
May 17, 2008
The back of the lens sub assembly.
Notice the little arm sticking up from the barrel of the lens at about the 1 o'clock position. It slid through a slot at the bottom of the viewfinder and engaged a lens element in the view finder. The other end of the arm attached to a sliding portion of the lens barrel and so it changed the distance between the two rectangular lens elements to change the field of view in the viewfinder.
May 17, 2008
This is a complete disassembly of the main lens (i.e. no viewfinder parts). From left to right, top to bottom
The retaining ring that held the lens to the camera.
The outer part of the barrel, the part that turns.
Cam posts and screws.
The inner part of the barrel; the stationary part that attached to the camera.
The shutter with a little spring hanging off of it. It used to sit on top of the pins in the inner barrel.
The near lens element; the one closest to the imaging plane. This was a stationary element that snapped into the back of the inner barrel. You can actually remove the lens element from the frame.
The holder for the far lens element; the element closest to the subject of the photo. There's a post coming out of this photo (3 o'clock position) that used drive the holder.
The far lens element. Its retaining ring snapped into the holder.
The front cover of the lens. The words "Zoom 35-55 Lens Focus Free" are face down. The clear piece of plastic is a window to seal the lens assembly.
May 17, 2008
A standard issue Nikon BF-1A body cap with most of the actual "cap" part of the cap cut out. I cut the cap out all the way to the structural part of the mounting ring using a Dremel tool and then sanded it smooth.
May 17, 2008
The outer barrel cut down to a size that would actually produce an image.
The big challenge with converting the Focus Free lens to work with an F-mount camera was to get the distance between the rear lens element and the imaging plane right. In the original camera the shutter was in the lens and it wasn't an SLR so there wasn't a great big mirror between the rear element and the film plane. To make up the distance added by the SLR's mirror I had to cut down the length of the barrel. This was a very iterative process.
May 17, 2008
As in the last picture, you can see the cam slot cut into the side of the barrel. This is what moved the lens elements back and forth when the outer barrel was turned. A pin on the front element holder engaged one slot, and a pin on the viewfinder lens engaged the other.
