u/Tobirama2020

And it swirl.

I always wonder about kowa lenses, but the price and it is quite rare, make me never really bothered. Until I got it cheap £ 10 broken kowa e with decent lens. Stand alone kowa lenses is harder to get and to pricey for me. And I after the lens with extra writing on it, like tokyo kogaku, or in this one kowa optical works, it just add interest for me and rumour said japanese lens with this kind of extra writing, is one of their best effort, even it is usually old, and early production.

First try is really good, sharpness and contrast are excellent, and for old lens, this one not scared of frontal light, my first old lens that behave like that. Colour cast is more to blue when using fix temp, in auto wb it give yellow-red-ish tint, make the vintage feel quite strong.

First I thought it a bit yellowish because I have not sealed the adapter from light,but not much different after I sealed it.

Few sample sooc, feeling brave, focus on infinity wide open.

Finally got time to make an adapter and aperture ring, even got problem with printer, don't bother to re-print again for now, maybe after fix the design later.

Lens is sharp, colour is good, strong enough that I have to reduce a little after editing. Not so good is mfd around 14 feet. But looks lovely with aluminium body. Flare resistance quite good for an old lens with this shallow front element design.

So far, this is the most troublesome lens I ever fix. Got some part missing and found out so many parts missing, no slide guide, aperture selector lever inside, focus stopper, aperture lever, and worse it helicoid stuck completely because of flake lining and it drop in 3 places around main helicoid, render 3 out of 4 helical damaged. But I enjoy stuff like this, take my time, almost a month every now and then fix small things.

The hardest was to remove jammed main helicoid, all trick i know was not working. Heat it up really hot, gentle tap, bang so hard that it damaged few more lol, acetone bath for a week, and I use 98% acetone, very strong one, this is after I make the rest of helicoid as round as possible and fixed damages few helical area.

In the end, before I decided to just planting the glass in different body, I cut the inner helicoid, and free it with huge damage, and managed to fix it, works ok, smooth enough but there are still tiny bit of roughness, like a bit dried helicoid.

So I have to remake the missing stuffs as long as it works, only aperture lever that I didn't created, just pull aperture opener fork with small spring, so just function from aperture ring, good enough for me. Slide guide I made from 2 of 2 pence coins, and the rest just made it with 3d printing. Even the glass itself was so horrible, full of fungus everywhere and dust, but no scratch, so after cleaning it, it is perfect glass, most important. And I am happy with the result, might redo most of the job in the future.

Always curious about this lens, but don't want to pay the price, so got one in really bad condition, fix and clean nicely and make diy adapter from camera cap, cylinder from broken zoom lens with some stapler. Haven't got time to diy up the adapter. Result wise is good, and changing aperture in this lens is easy.

This lens these days probably the best value to price of 135mm at least in UK. Can be had around tenner and sometimes under £ 10 in broken condition. It doesn't get much appreciation, even the sharpness, colour, build quality is excellent for an old lens. And quite easy to repair, cla even to calibrated aperture and focusing distance.

Still one of my fav 135mm even I haven't used this for so long until yesterday.