While cleaning one of my camera sensors, I noticed my incredibly pocketable and convenient 12mm f/2.0 Olympus lens developed a fatal flaw. A rather large reflective fragment became dislodged inside the lens and was robbing me of precious photons. I couldn’t fully clean the rear element with compressed air and a microfiber cloth, so I decided to dig a little deeper and disassemble the lens.

From the rear of the lens, there are 4 coarse threaded screws that mate the stainless steel mount to the plastic lens body assembly (circled in black) and there are 3 tiny black machine screws that retain the rear plastic baffle to the lens mount (circled in white). There is also one cheeky little countersunk machine screw that fastens down the electronic lens block to the side of the lens mount (circled in red). The disassembly went smoothly and I was able to remove…