Spent $180 on a vintage lens spanner wrench, best money I ever wasted

Picked up a beat-up Nikon F from a garage sale in Tulsa and needed a proper spanner to get a stuck retaining ring off the front element. Dropped $180 on an old Kodak-branded spanner set from a retired repair guy's estate, and it turned that nightmare job into a 10 minute fix. Anyone else find that spending real money on a specific tool for one job ends up paying for itself in saved headaches?

3 comments

3 Comments

linda_dixon4922h ago

My garage sale find was a beat-up Rolleicord that had a stuck focus ring on it and no amount of gentle persuasion worked. I finally broke down and spent $150 on a set of old German-made spanner wrenches from an estate sale, and that thing turned a weekend project into about 20 minutes of careful work. I still use those wrenches for half the camera repairs I do now, they never slip or mar the metal. The trick is to find the ones with replaceable tips so you can sharpen them when they get dull, that's where the real value is long term. If you got a set from an actual repair guy's bench, you probably scored some heat-treated steel that'll outlast any modern Chinese junk. Sounds like you did good, lol.

rowan96921h ago

180 bucks for old spanner wrenches? You could have gotten a whole set of new ones from China for a tenth of that and they'd do the same job for a weekend hobby. Those German ones are just overpriced bragging rights at this point, especially if you're not doing this for a living. Replaceable tips sound nice but you're just paying extra for something you could file down yourself with a cheap metal file. My grandpa fixed old cameras for years with a pair of needle nose pliers and some electrical tape, never needed special tools. Maybe I'm wrong but spending that kind of cash on tools you'll use twice a year feels like a waste. You could have put that money toward a lens or film instead.

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finley_gonzalez491d ago

I read somewhere that old repair guys always have the best tools, and that $180 is cheap for no more headaches later.