It seems to me I spend a lot of time pushing at any limitations in the mobile photography system. As soon as I find something that doesn’t work I try to find a solution.
The past few days I have been working on making an adapter to attach my 37mm accessories to my Moment Tele lens. I really want to be able to use it more for close-ups but by itself it doesn’t focus close at all - about 36” (on the 2x lens).
Sure, tape works well enough to temporarily attach filters but I worry about the alignment, etc. I also have other things in mind coming up. Like neutral density filters for slower shutter speeds, and that requires a light-tight fit.
The adapter needs to be a slip-on thing although permanently attaching an empty 37mm filter ring would be easier. So here’s my solution.
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Here’s the Moment Tele lens, some 37mm close-up lenses and a polarizer, and the adapter on the right. It started with a standard step-up ring to the desired 37mm size. I had to grind away the centre of the step-up ring until it just fit exactly outside the Moment Tele. A bit fiddly but that was the easy part. Finding a piece of tubing the exact diameter to slip over the Moment Tele was much harder. Fortunately I have lots of raw materials, leftover stuff from dismantled, salvaged, um... junk. I mean useful stuff. It needed to be rigid plastic not soft plastic in order for the glue to bond securely.
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On the left is my plastic sleeve with the filter holder glued to the front with cyanoacrylate glue made by Gorilla glue. In actual fact, the piece of tubing I found was just a bit too tight to fit in and I had to resize the inside diameter about 1/2mm. That was fairly painstaking with lots of checking along the way. Now I’m quite happy with the fit. It presses on smoothly without scratching the lens barrel.
View attachment 115394
Here it is in place on the Moment Tele with a Tiffen close-up lens neatly screwed on in front. I was fortunate enough to find a piece of tubing with a slight flange on the end which provided more surface area to glue the adapter ring.
If you look at this a minute you can see that once it is slipped on there’s nothing left to hold onto to pull it off again. So that means it has to be able to push all the way through until it slides off the other end. It works as slick as you like.
Now wouldn’t it have been easier if the lens came with filter threads in the first place?