WATE hood detent

[ho_co]

I was under the impression that the Tri-Elmar 16-18-21 f/4 was designed in such a way that fully mounting the hood compressed an O-ring, holding the hood in place. Am I wrong?

My sample of the lens allows me to turn the hood fully to its stop without increase of pressure; the hood remains loose and easily unscrews.

Any suggestions? Send lens off to Leica, I suppose?

Thanks!

--HC

[gwelland]

That is correct - the rubber ring provides a weak element that does very slightly compress when you screw on the hood. I've found that it does compress but if you unscrew the hood and reseat the ring slightly away from the end of the thread and then carefully screw the hood back on you'll get renewed friction. Don't do what Michael Reichmann over at Luminous Landscape did which was manage to cross thread the rubber ring and hood/lens - Screwing the hood on should gently slide the ring to the end of the thread and compress it slightly.

You could try an alternative rubber ring from a hardware store or I'd just stick a small piece of black tape underneath to put a better hold on the hood - you'll never see it and you don't need much. Another alternative is to use one of the thread lock compounds - I'd even consider a short piece of plumbers tape on the thread before screwing on the hood perhaps?

Sending to Leica for this sounds like complete overkill. Kind of like sending your car back to BMW for a flat tyre repair.

[marknorton]

HC, does your lens have an o-ring installed - right at the base of the red thread? If there's no o-ring, the hood will certainly not tighten before reaching the thread-stop.

[ho_co]

Graham and Mark--
Thanks for the pointers. The o-ring seems to roll too far onto the lens, almost hiding itself under the aperture ring. On your advice, I rolled it forward a couple threads, then re-installed the hood, but got same results:

Hood pushes o-ring too far back. The hood meets no resistance from the o-ring before meeting the end of its thread, where it 'thunks' against the end of its rotation with no compression. The hood just spins off the lens with the flick of a finger.

Maybe I caused the problem trying the Milich adapter. I've got an early one of those, from before John began supplying the retaining ring since none of us had seen the Leica filter (and I can't get the filter out of its mount anyway). Maybe when I tried it on the lens I stretched the o-ring.

The WATE is quite a nice lens, but without a filter I've messed up a lot of images forgetting to tell the camera to ignore lens ID.

Its o-ring design sounds good but seems lacking in execution.

Thanks again.

--HC