By Ben Eisendrath
AUTHOR NOTE: *I am in NO WAY recommending anyone try to modify their own lens! This was my adventure and I accepted the risk.*
I love vintage LTM and M lenses and have Leitz/Leica glass dating all the way back to the 30s, when it was the wild west in terms of swirl and flare. My 50mm Summicron DR (Dual Range) actually falls into the newer range of my collection, having been produced in the last year, 1969 (incidentally my birth year).
In normal-range of one meter to infinity the lens exhibits lovely rendering, coming out at a time when Leica seemed to have mastered coatings and smoothed bokeh, and since my copy came so late in the run, it presumably has everything they could give to the aging design. I bought the lens for my M3, but took it on occasional outings mounted to my M10s once I took the digital plunge.
Its full name at Leica is the 50mm Summicron with Near-Focusing Range. Detachable goggles, when mounted, allowed you to switch it over to near-range by depressing a ball bearing on the top of the lens, freeing the barrel to pull out and flip it over a notch on top. If that bearing isn’t depressed, you cannot switch the range. Ingenious. However, my copy’s previous owner had lost the goggles and I didn’t know what I was missing, figuring at the time that I wouldn’t like another piece to lose nor did I need to get closer than four feet.
Many feel that the DR, as most call it, was a high water mark for Leica engineering, including the infamous Mr Rockwell, at least when he reviewed it some years ago.
"It is the closest-focusing 50mm lens ever made for LEICA M. Today's lenses only focus to 0.7m, not 478 millimeters, but worse, newer lenses don't optimize viewfinder magnification at close distances for correct framing. THe close-up attachment [Goggles]seen below not only recalibrates the rangefinder, it also changes the finder magnification slightly to mirror the slightly narrower angle of view at close range, as well as correcting for parallax.
This is LEICA's greatest 50mm lens ever, and 50mm is the most important, useful and critical lens in any 35mm or full-frame system.” - Ken Rockwell
Unfortunately, when Leica finally took the M line digital, this was one of the only lenses left behind in terms of compatibility. According to Leica the DR would damage the M8, the M9, the M240 and shouldn’t be used on the M10, either. The lens’ rangefinder cam extends further into the body than other glass, so there simply wasn't enough room to move on the early digitals. The nuance for the M10, I found after carefully trying it on mine (in a Lieca store with nervous employees watching) is that the DR does work just fine up to about 25 feet in distance. It just wouldn't go to infinity. The cam binds inside the camera mount (not near the shutter or sensor thankfully), so mine, missing the goggles and therefore near-focus, was limited to only part of the normal, longer range.
That inconvenience bothered me only once in a while because my photography style is more portrait than landscape, usually well within 25 feet of my subject, and spent most of its time on the M3.
Then out came the M11, and Leica had finally made a digital M that could take the Dual Range, presumably by making more room inside the new camera’s body. I’d decided to stay all-in on my M10s, however, enjoying the legacy bottom plate, lack of ports, shared batteries and of course their still-formidable specs. But it got me thinking again. I even finally picked up a set of near-focus goggles to play with. Wow — was I ever wrong to dismiss this unused range as a convenience. The simple fact that I could get so much closer to a subject magnified separation in my images dramatically. The shots looked positively Noct-like.
Soon the infinity limitation was really eating at me. I wanted to use this lens even more often. Further, I’d recently read some discussions that mentioned DRs home-modified to work on M10s, but of course without details of how that was done. I was starting to doubt both Leica corporate and the grizzled camera guy who'd told me shortly after purchase that it could be modified, but it would lose the close focus range and “won’t be a Dual Range anymore”, his statement dripping with disapproval.
I looked closer at both my DR and M10 bodies. A lot closer. Since the lens had been on my cameras a lot, and I hit the bind point pretty regularly, AND it was the only lens that did that, there must be a mark inside the body, right? And if I find it, and the part of the lens cam hitting it…could I fix this?
I found the mark. Then I found the part of the cam making contact, by simply holding it close to the camera and turning it to where it would bind and visually lining that up. The offending portion of the cam was obvious, and the bind was happening at the bottom of the internal camera frame. If the contact point hadn’t been so clear I would’ve put a little charcoal on the brass to see where it left a mark. The nature of the bind was that the turning cam extended into the camera, where its OUTSIDE edge would begin rubbing on the camera’s blacked magnesium until the friction was great enough to make you stop, lest you force something.
The difference between 25 feet and infinity in terms of how far the cam had to turn was in the neighborhood of a centimeter and a half. The cam ring is about one millimeter thick. I have some fancy chef knives, so also an array of sharpeners, one of which seemed perfect for the task. The machine is a tiny handheld belt sander for metal. VERY carefully I shaved the brass a fraction of a millimeter thinner on the outside, for the distance it needed to go to reach infinity. I shaved a little, blew any dust away, tried it on the camera, then shaved a tiny bit more, and tried it again. It got closer each time, and finally the barrel turned and clicked on that blessed infinity mark.
Critically, since I didn’t shorten the cam there was no effect on contact with the rangefinder arm.
Looking at the modified lens, the shaved portion is barely discernible looking straight down at the lens rear, but you can see the “new” metal where the change was made.
Once I got over the nerves of trying this the actual process took about 30 minutes, where most of it was making absolutely sure I was working on the right portion of the cam.The lens now works wonderfully in both near-focus and normal range, and all distances on my M10s.
And, importantly, the DR still works exactly as designed on the camera I bought it for, the immortal ’59 M3.
Bio:
Ben Eisendrath, via his company Grillworks, designs and manufactures specialty wood burning grills for the culinary world (grillworks.com
He’s also an avid Leica photographer, his work published in many blogs, including Leica’s, books and periodicals including The Washington Post, for which he is a member of their contributor Talent Network. He resides in Washington DC and his IG for photography is @insomnigraphic
 | Grillworks makes the purist's premier wood-fired grills. For over 30 years, since the ground-breaking Grillery, home grillers and chefs have turned to the grills that are truly Argentine Inspired, American Made. grillworks.com |
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