I’ve been looking at this lens on my desk for a couple years now. I’ve long wondered what the mechanics inside looked like and how they operated. Curiosity got the best of me so I grabbed a little screwdriver kit and started dismantling the lens. I don’t really have engineer inclinations, just curiosity, especially since this is one of the lenses that I seem to grab the most, largely due to its practical focal range. It lacks the beauty of a prime but contains all the liberties of a zoom lens. Once I got it all apart (mostly anyway, I could not bust two screws on the barrel with my small screwdriver handle) I realized that it was not as complex of a build as I expected. As a matter of fact, if I had taken notes, I think I could rebuild it. And if you wondering at this point why I would cannibalize such a lens, it is the one I dropped in a river a few years ago, and was given a coroner’s ticket from Canon. I’m keeping it around for parts, should that ever be necessary.