How to Make Your Own Lens Adapters

Hopefully this is helpful!! Let me know if you have questions, and for the pros at this let us know any tidbits or advice you have to help someone new on this journey 👍

You can get a pretty good estimate of flange depth by just holding the lens near the camera without an adapter and moving it forward and back until you find infinity focus, then measuring the distance. Just "free lensing" it. If the camera and adapter aren't in direct light, no overhead lights shining on the sensor, and you're aiming the combination at something in good light, it's quite easy to see.

I've been doing this for about 10 years and have done it with many different lenses. One of the lenses I adapted was from an old Argus camera and I used a body cap a Dremel tool and a lot of trial and error to get it to work on my Canon DSLR. Canon EF Mount is really good one to adapt a lot of lenses of course. I've done Olympus Pentax Yashica Nikon and others. But in the last few years I've mainly made custom adapters for my Sony mirrorless. Many of the lenses that I've done come out of fixed lens cameras that I take apart and make my own homemade adapter. There are cameras with tiny glass lenses that are maybe like a quarter inch wide that were made to cover full 35mm frame. There's nothing like finding an old point and shoot 35 mm or APS camera that cost $5 or so with a 24 or 28mm glass lens taking it apart and adapting it. Putting it on the camera and being blown away by how good the images are. I spent many many hours figuring out a way to do this the hard part is getting the lenses so you can adjust the focus, some people have said on here a helicoid might be a really good way to do it but in my case I kind of defeats the purpose because of how much they cost and takes the fun and challenge out of it. Because for 25 or 30 bucks I could get a decent 28mm lens and then spend 12 or so on an adapter and put it directly on the camera which of course I've done. I have quite a few 24 and 28mm lenses from slrs and a few Pentax Auto 110 lenses Etc as well which I made my own aperture for.

Good to find someone else who will take on a project just because it appears possible. My current on going project is a Ford F150 with a newer engine and 2 computers, 1 for the engine and 1 for the rest of the truck. The wiring harness looks like a messy ball of wires.

Yesssssssssssssss!! Thank you so much for adapting this difficult old lens for me! I’m so excited to try it and loved this video, as someone who’s never done 3D printing before, you make it seem less intimidating to try it for the first time.

Something I want to add. 1. If some lens can’t adapt to a camera. It’s usually because the flange distance of the body is bigger than the original lens system. But you can fix that by put another len between the adapter. Just like a speed booster. You can find canon FD to canon EF mount. 2. Flange distance of the digital camera not exactly that simple. Because in front of the sensor is a dust filter. I once remove a damaged dust filter , after put everything together I found out I can’t focus to infinity anymore. After that I have to remove few spacer between the sensor and the body , make the sensor move closer to the mount. It works like normal again. That’s why. However you try to caculate It’s will messed up somehow. All the adapter manufacturers know that. They stop trying to make a perfec adapter. Instead simply make it little bit shorter. To make sure the len you use can focus to infinity. You guys can try that on your lens , camera. 1. Minimum focus always further than the lens said( distance indicates on the lens) , 2 it’s always focus pass infinity. That’s why you can’t Zone focus like some photographers on YouTube show. One more thing. If you can’t find a 3D printer , or just want to mess around. You always can use a PVC tube, a body cap (for the body end of course) , and a len cap ( for the lens mount ) worst thing can happen is the tube not cut good enough. Two caps not parallel, and you got a “tilt shift “ lens , with real miniature effects 😂😂😂 Manual glass is my things. I can talk about it all day.

I adapted an old worn out 35mm manual shift lens from a Nikon mount to a Minolta mount in the '70's. (I should have adapted it to "T" mount - oh well!). I used a Dremel tool to cut off the Nikon mount, then epoxied the lens to a Pentax screw to Minolta adapter. It was so ugly, but it worked and I used it for years. I did do all the measuring like you mentioned. I knew I wouldn't get the flange distance perfect so I purposely sacrificed close focus to guarantee infinity focus. I thought that was a good trade off for an architectural lens. Great topic!

I found Altix V mount adapter for Fujifilm cameras. I have full Meyer Optik set for Altix. They are pretty rare to find so this was really a surprise that someone made it. And for that mount exist only 4 lenses Carl Zeiss Tessar 50mm f2.8, Meyer Optik Gorlitz Primagon 35mm f4.5, Trioplan 50mm f2.9 and Telefogar 90mm f3.5.

This video kinda read my mind! I have been seriously considering doing my own attempt of 3D printing an adapter to use my Canon RF lenses on my Nikon Z system. That would be a very thin adapter that's only 4mm thick and has to accommodate both mount designs (Nikon Z from the outside and Canon R from the inside). However, the problem with such an adapter without contacts for aperture control is that you'll be using the maximum aperture of your lens all the time. In principle, I know the adapter will work because Sony E-mount to Z-mount adapters exist out there, and Sony's flange distance is even shorter than Canon R by 2mm. No company would ever dare to make this adapter because Canon will make sure that the idea dies in the crib!

I’ve always wanted to try making some custom mounts, awesome video!

Where 3D printed adapter is really useful is in harvesting lenses from old fixed (non-removable) lens cameras, e.g., Yashica Electro 35 GT, Minolta Hi-Matic, etc. The lenses itself comes off easily enough, but won't be to a standard mount. Each one is a custom job. Come to think of it, I should probably stock up on the old fixed lens junkers while the going is still good. Good vintage lens deals are already becoming rarer.

Good work again snappy..keep the good work..it's awesome the age we live in..

I'm not even a photographer but this video had all I needed to know to change the lens on a night vision device. Thank you!

The hippiest hipster this side of the Mississippi. lol Love it

Hi there! Thanks for the inspiring video, definitely now I want to 3d print some flanges. I've already used a body cap with some plumbing tubes and a rubber corrugated tube from an auto repair shop with the lens I've dismounted from an old projector ) it looks lame but it's working 😊

Fabulous video! Thank you!

Have no access to a 3D printer nor any classic lenses. Still, I found this video interesting and fun to watch! Your explanation of the process made it sound doable even for an amateur ! Thank you!!

I am a foto noob and I spend last weekend trying to adapt a giant machine-vision lens I found at the scrapyard to my old DSLR. Soo funny to see there is a whole community of people doing the same exact things! I found the sensor distance of the lens by projecting the image on a postcard and measuring the distance to the flange.

What a golden hands are hidden behind this channel? No problem with old digicam or Pentax content but I want more 3D printing camera experiments!

A helicoid adapter can help you hone in on those flange distances. For some stuff it's pretty much required, and you also get something useful for macro. I have a helicoid M42 to MFT adapter, as wel as a Tilt adapter and a C-mount adapter. There's just a lot of fun to be had in mirrorless and it's taken me to the point where I am saving up to get something like a Canon R series to just get that extra sensor surface to really pull as much as possible from all the weird lenses I've managed to pick up over the years.