Mythical K3 F Mount

[Jeremy Saltry]

A few times in the past year or so I have ready about an F mount K3 which was a hard mount. Taking into consideration the focal flange distance of M42 and F, I am wondering if this was able to focus to infinity or not. Like I said this has only come up in conversation in forms from around 2006-10 a handful of times with no instruction. Anyone have any ideas if its doable?

[Ruben Arce]

The focal flange of M42 is 45.46 mm, the focal flange of Nikon F mount is 46.50 mm, so it is technically possible, but not as easy as using an adapter. I used to have a K3 I had a Nikon adapter and nikon lenses and it was like a telescope, lenses don't behave as normal but as magnifiers, now If you know how to do machining or if you want to spend the money to pay a machinist it's a fairly easy job to create a hard mount for nikon and even EF mount lenses. You can even buy an adaptor for nikon, remove the mount and you don't need to machine that part from scratch, just adapt it to the camera, make sure the focal flange is correct (Collimated) and the lens should work. I was thinking about buying a k3 to do that, but I got an Eclair NPR which is pretty cool and I abandoned the idea.

 

I invested in a set of Rockinon DS lenses and I like shooting film, as I mentioned before I have a NPR and the camera has a PL mount and a C mount turret, I bought a Canon EF (Rokinon) to C-Mount adapter and boom, now I can use my Rokinons on the NPR, it doesn't focus to infinity perfectly, but as soon as I get the camera serviced I'm going to use a caliper to collimate the adapter to it's proper focal flange and it will work even better (infinity).