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I am not quite sure what has happened here, but ...:

After having been out in the rain and using my Nikon Ai 300mm f4.5 lens, I just tucked it away in my camera bag and forgot it there. It was probably wet and it seems to me as if water has creeped in between the lens tube and the retractable lens hood and caused the rubber fodder of the lens hood to partially dissolve. When moving the lens hood back and forth, crumbles of black, gooey rubber are falling off and sticking to the front glass if I don't have the lens cover on. Under the black coating, the bare metal is appearing, which is optically not an ideal thing.

Is there some obvious way to remove the lens hood from the lens tube, so that I can get the old coating completely removed and replace it with something else? Perhaps a very thin sheet of felt or something similar. There are unfortunately no obvious screws or other tell-tale signs of how it is actually attached.

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  • Water doesn't usually dissolve or otherwise adversely affect rubber (not accounting for various pollutants in the water - but that would have to be a pretty high concentration to have that sort of affect)... Are you sure that rain is the only involved agent here?
    – twalberg
    Sep 2, 2021 at 16:15
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    @twalberg No, that's why I started by saying that I am not sure what has happened., I have however no other idea what it could be but remains of rain water on the lens. I do not have any other fluids in my camera bag and when I discovered the problem, about two weeks later, the inside of the lens hood was still moist. I don't think it is very important though what has actually happened. To fix the problem, I need to take of the lens hood and replace the coating nevertheless.
    – jarnbjo
    Sep 2, 2021 at 16:23
  • It has to be between 20 & 50 years old - my bet would be the rubber has simply perished… & you only just noticed, or it only just started breaking down badly.
    – Tetsujin
    Sep 2, 2021 at 20:00
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    @Tetsujin The lens was only built from 1977 to -81, so it is at least 40 years old. I didn't think about that, but it may very well be that the coating was already brittle and is falling apart just because I touched it when trying to wipe up the moisture. But as I already said, it doesn't really matter why this is happening. The coating is falling apart and I am asking how to take off the lens hood so that I can replace it.
    – jarnbjo
    Sep 2, 2021 at 22:25
  • I bought, shot, and resold one last year. A little bird photography on m4/3. I don’t remember seeing an obvious way to remove the hood, and I know there is no good way to take off the tripod collar, so I can see Nikon maybe making the hood hard to remove.
    – Bob Macaroni McStevens
    Sep 3, 2021 at 4:30

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