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My old mentor in Fresno swears by factory shims, I've been cutting my own for 6 months
My old mentor in Fresno has been fixing cameras for 31 years and he told me last month that cutting shims from a soda can is how you wreck a lens mount. I switched to factory shims at 40 cents each and my collimation is dead on now, but the guy in the next bay over says he's been paper shimming Canon FD mounts for two decades without a single comeback. So which is it, are we wasting money on factory parts or playing with fire by cutting our own?
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the_thomas21d ago
Did you ever try shimming something and end up with more shims than lens? Because that was me last winter with a Minolta mount, I cut shims from a feeler gauge like an idiot and somehow the focus ring got stiffer instead of sharper. My take is the factory shims are cheap enough that the real cost is your time, forty cents versus an hour of trimming aluminum with tin snips and hoping it's flat. That said, the FD guy clearly found something that works, and if he's got twenty years of comebacks at zero maybe paper compresses in a way that actually helps those old mounts. I keep factory shims in a little bag now, mostly because I got tired of tiny metal slivers in my fingers.
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