where there’s smoke there’s fire

The Nikon Repair Center in Taiwan can restore and paint any Nikkor lens. NRC sent me some pictures of their latest lens restoration and transformation project – the detailed steps remain a trade secret, but they told me that the process is similar to how they cleaned a lens damaged by salt water few months ago.

They first bought a beat up used 70-200mm f/2.8 lens that looked like this:

It seems that one of the most difficult part is to paint/restore the Nikon golden plate:

This is how the gold plate looks after it is done. All dents on the lens body are now gone:

All writing and labels on the lens were also restored:

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