Spent the day sorting huge amount of gear out.
Mixed the new Vermont Nikon Nikkor gear haul (Thanks Adam in Northfield, Vermont!!) with my Nikon gear and Nikon yard sale items from Philadelphia years back.

I’ve got (2) new Nikkor 28-105mm matched lenses, and (1) Nikkor 75-300mm. These are film lenses and full frame.

Spent a bunch of time on my beautiful Nikkor 85mm f1.8 prime.
It was left last time with 1 of 3 screws in the mount sheared off and flush in the metal body. Not good. One screw was lost when I was last in there to see if the spring was gone or not hooked up for the iris to close back down. So that meant only one factory screw was holding the entire metal mount back! I machined a new screw – had to file down the outside edges / diameter off to fit in the metal opening on the mount, AND I had to then flat file down the screw head so it would mount in a body and not dig into the metal.
This was on a tiny tiny screw – I had to use smallest drill bit I had and drill into a piece of aluminum then screw the screw in a ways by forcing it to file it down. That’s the only way I could hold and work on this tiny thing.

Nikkor 85mm operation problem:

The way it has been working is the iris will manually open up, but if you manually close the iris nothing happens – the blades sit wide open. Last time I had the back off the lens I verified finally that the spring is in fact installed and working – it’s just the blades are not slick / slippery enough to return to closed.
The only way I can op the lens is with it wide open, OR I can mount the lens – say – closed down to f/22 and then open the lens to whatever iris I want to shoot. But then it’s stuck at the most wide open f stop that I set it at – I cannot close the iris back down unless I unmount the lens and manually move the bayonet by hand to close it back down. So going to any more wide open stop is fine, you just can’t go back.
Otherwise, this is a stunning lens. Beautiful glass, and as Ken Rockwell says the most amazing focus mechanism in hand.

RED Scarlet 4K camera:
I hand fabricated a new off camera monitor bracket. I may add a carrying handle to this as well. I was working on this bracket until 9pm and then finally stopped for dinner. I just made a single mount hole for the RED Scarlet body and a single hole for the RED Pro 5″ Touchscreen. I will add more to lock both sides off today. I made the mount at a forward sloping angle / offset to get the monitor forward and sit down lower by about 2 inches from the stock upper mount area.

Also used my now loved IDX VL2 Li-On battery charger for 3 RED Bricks. The charger works great!! Much better than the old beat up junky RED Chargers I bought from “the Wonder Boys” of Oakland about 4 years ago.

Machined (shortened) more 1/4-20″ bolts. Two specifically for the RED monitor so I can actually quick install them with a slot / flathead screwdriver instead of the dumb fitsnothing no-one-has allen key of some idiotic size that came with RED. I actually had to hand file down the outside of one of the bolts so it would fit flush properly in the base of the monitor mount. (Argh) But that’s done.

I also learned that although I spent a lot of time planning the bolt in spot on my Blue anodized aluminum shoulder mount that I built – I want to move the camera back towards my shoulder more, so I will be drilling in new mount spots tomorrow for that as well.

I also need to make the handgrips area much more solid, they are jiggly and too much movement up there right now so that’s to do as well.