Don Goldberg (DAG) is Awesome!

[endustry]

Just a quick note of praise for Don Goldberg. I sent him three lenses to be CLA'd a few months ago and sent him a note about two weeks back asking if he could bump them up in his queue so I could have them for a trip my wife and I are taking to Spain this winter. We leave on Tuesday and the lenses arrived this morning without notice. He shipped them back to me even before I had paid him! Furthermore, they look BEAUTIFUL!

[SolaresLarrave]

Don is a great craftsman when it comes to these things, but he's also a very understanding human being. And, with camera owners, well... he understands us.

[rogue_designer]

He's extremely busy these days, so it can take him a bit. But I've always found communication to be good - and the work top notch.

[BillBlackwell]

Just a quick note of praise for Don Goldberg. I sent him three lenses to be CLA'd a few months ago and sent him a note about two weeks back asking if he could bump them up in his queue so I could have them for a trip my wife and I are taking to Spain this winter. We leave on Tuesday and the lenses arrived this morning without notice. He shipped them back to me even before I had paid him! Furthermore, they look BEAUTIFUL!

That's awesome!

He is slow, but the best there is. Short of a warranty repair, no one else touches my Leica gear.

[endustry]

I sent the lenses to Don knowing full-well of his backlog and never expected the lenses to be done by the time of our trip. Nonetheless, with a little nudge, he was more than willing to oblige me. He is a busy guy but the work always speaks for itself in my opinion and, as someone else stated, he's a really great person to deal with.

[Dogman]

I wonder if he's closed for the holidays. I sent him my M6 the first of November after we exchanged several e-mails and he said he would look at it and give me an estimate. I haven't heard from him and he didn't answer a follow up e-mail I sent in early December.

[danwilly]

I have used him more than once. He takes checks. A real mensch.

[Santafecino]

Don is a complete expert in Leicas and has the equipment and the know-how to do the job right. Plus, after many years of work on Leicas, he still cares a lot about the art.
--Lindsay

[visiondr]

Don made my 50/2.8 Elmar a joy to use by replacing the stock Leica grease with what he called "real" grease - a very simple fix that made the lens smooth as silk. Yes, he is a busy man, but his work is first rate.

[bobkonos]

Yep, Don is the man. He just repaired the shutter brake on my black M3, and you would never know he had touched the camera. He is a joy to know and work with, and for all of us who have vintage rangefinders to keep working, he is the choice and we are lucky to have him. Period.

[julianphotoart]

I cannot say enough about DAG.

In a post on RFF 2 years ago I told the story of having dropped an M3 into the Pacific Ocean. Attached to that M3 was a ZM 25mm f/2.8 lens. 3 days after the event (and after NOT having kept the camera and lens immersed in water) I asked DAG for CODE BLUE help.

He calmly diagnosed the patients, told me how to send them to him, and magnificently repaired both camera and lens to as-good-as-new.

At the time this event occurred, I'm not sure DAG had worked on that many (if any) ZM lenses but that didn't stop him from persevering.

If he runs out of cameras to fix, I think he'd do just fine switching to open-heart surgery.

[raid]

Don is a very nice man. This is for me a highly important factor when choosing a first class [read "costly"] repair person to get rid off a problem.

I have a Canon 50/1.2 that have fuzzy looking images. Nothing at all was in focus. Don found an internal problem, and he rearranged the glass elements to give me a very sharp lens. I mailed him the lens from the USA, and I stayed in email contact with him from Japan. He made sure to time the return of the lens with me being home again. Sure enough, two days after my return home, Don had sent me the lens back fully repaired.

He is honest. I once sent him a Zeiss 85mm/1.4 with aperture problems. He tried to get spare parts, but then told me that the lens cannot be repaired,and he didnot charge me much.

[akptc]

I agree 100% that Don does exceptional work and is a great guy to talk with. But is Don MIA? I've been trying to get in touch with him via email and by phone, to no avail.

[furcafe]

That means he's either very busy (or @ least busier than normal) or on vacation/break.

I agree 100% that Don does exceptional work and is a great guy to talk with. But is Don MIA? I've been trying to get in touch with him via email and by phone, to no avail.

[akptc]

Well, wouldn't you know it, shortly after posting my question I was able to get Don on the phone. Need to go buy some patience pills :)

[dannynono]

I've not used Don yet, but I did send a late night email re upgrading my M6 finder. He responded within an hour after my email and this was well after midnight east coast. He'll get my camera once I have the funds.

[Hacker]

I've not used Don yet, but I did send a late night email re upgrading my M6 finder. He responded within an hour after my email and this was well after midnight east coast. He'll get my camera once I have the funds.

He will reply pretty quickly with a deadline that sounds very good, a week or two at the most before your equipment is sent in. It's been 3 months now and he does not even to bother to reply to me now. For the first month, it was always next week.

He is totally not reliable when it comes to deadlines and commitments. You will be much better off with someone else.

[januaryman]

Harsh. I had similar experiences with Mark Hama and I was cussing him up and down for not delivering when he promised - three times he said he'd mail it back. But when I got it back, and it was perfect, and everything3was clean and aligned and quiet... well, so was I. Quiet, I mean. Camera repair ain't like changing your oil and you need to cut these guys some slack. Unless they don't do the repair right and won't fix it. THEN you have a problem.

We all need patience pills, as someone up before me has eloquently stated, I believe.

(And I neither know or use Dan. Yet.)

[Al Patterson]

So we have two excellent repair guys who do great work but are REALLY busy. You do know that time they spend on the phone or answering e-mail take away from the time they can spend actually REPAIRING your item?

[KoNickon]

Well said! We need to keep in mind how busy they are, and that simple, quick repairs are going to be the exception, not the rule.

One guy who is remarkably fast is Krikor Marelian (Krimar Photo), a Rollei specialist. But he is unusual in that regard.

Not to tell Don, Mark et al. how to run their businesses, but a simple phone call or e-mail just to say "I'm going to get to your job next week" or the like would keep us off their backs!

[digitalintrigue]

True, it does take time responding to emails. But it is very frustrating when, as Hacker says, Don replies quickly to emails regarding a new job, and then after he gets the equipment, he begins to ignore any and ALL emails. I was very very patient with him, not pressing him at all, but he completely ignored emails for two months (17 total.) As a result, he was then interrupted with phone calls, at which point he apologized for not replying to the emails. Phone calls are much more disruptive to work flow than emails...

Add to this the unrealistic turnaround times, and multiple broken promises, and he's only making things more difficult for himself.

I finally asked him to return the gear. He promised to ship it that day. Two weeks later, I had to make another phone call to remind him to ship it back.

[Solinar]

This is disturbing news, folks. My own IIIf and IIIg were rejuvenated by Don in 2005 and 2006 respectively. The work was top notch. The wait time was between two and three weeks - which no longer seems to be the norm.

[jmkelly]

This sounds like "the market" at work. Don has done some great work for me in the past. More recenntly he has responded very quickly - including quick shipping - when I have called him to order items from his stock. But due to reports of slow turnaround I have been sending items needing repair to others lately, notably Brian Sweeney, Youxin Ye and Dean Williams (all excellent, with quick turnaround) and Ken Ruth (waiting, patiently for the time being - as Jim noted, working on old camera gear is not like repairing last year's car). Anyone have any recent experience with Sherry Krauter?

[LChanyungco]

i just had a rigid summicron worked on by Sherry, she said it would take 4 weeks. i had it in 4 weeks.