Help please - stuck filter

A cut up car or motorbike inner tube?
 
Do you care about damaging the filter?
If not, grab the rim of the filter with a pair of pliers.
Hold the removed front ring of your lens whilst wearing a glove of some type.
Twist the filter very firmly anti clockwise with the pliers.

The other alternative is break and remove the filter glass and just squash the remaining aluminium ring.
It will come out.
 
soupdragon said:
... grab the rim of the filter with a pair of pliers ...
Click to expand...

In my experience (and I have a lot of experience here), that really doesn't work reliably.

This is a mock-up of a pair of 6" pliers gripping a 77mm filter. As you'll see it won't grip very well. You can't get much torque on it. Of course you can get pliers longer than 6", but they tend to be very thick, and it's difficult to grip a slim filter without gripping whatever the filter is attached to.

But even if you can get a good grip, you need something to hold the other thing equally tightly so that you can rotate them against one another. That's exactly what filter wrenches are designed for, and why they come in pairs.

upload_2018-4-26_11-52-53.png
 

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StewartR said:
In my experience (and I have a lot of experience here), that really doesn't work reliably.

This is a mock-up of a pair of 6" pliers gripping a 77mm filter. As you'll see it won't grip very well. You can't get much torque on it. Of course you can get pliers longer than 6", but they tend to be very thick, and it's difficult to grip a slim filter without gripping whatever the filter is attached to.

But even if you can get a good grip, you need something to hold the other thing equally tightly so that you can rotate them against one another. That's exactly what filter wrenches are designed for, and why they come in pairs.

View attachment 125170
Click to expand...

I had trouble explaining what I meant.
Grip the thin wall of the filter as opposed to the outer diameter and not with needle nosed pliers.

If the filter is inconsequential then damaging it won't matter.
 
I understood what you meant @soupdragon and appreciate your thoughts @StewartR .

Update: the lens filter wrenches arrived this morning (as a pair) and I set to work on them. Now either this filter has been welded on, or more likely the wrenches I bought were substandard. You know the ‘pay cheap pay twice’ saying yeah, well these looked ok, were £3.99 a pair off that well known auction site, and they are so thin that you can’t get any purchase on them. Complete waste of time.

Anyhoooo, I took a screw driver to the filter. Smashed the glass (deliberately) and removed it all. No damage to the ring, so I can still put other filters on if I ever need to, and the lens cap still fits nicely.

Sure it’s not perfect, but it’s a good enough medium term solution.

I would like to thank all of you who suggested advice and took the time to explain your thoughts.

Cheers!
 
Well done.
I assume you'll be releasing the video tutorial any time now?;)
 
gremlin16 said:
Update: the lens filter wrenches arrived this morning (as a pair) and I set to work on them. Now either this filter has been welded on, or more likely the wrenches I bought were substandard. You know the ‘pay cheap pay twice’ saying yeah, well these looked ok, were £3.99 a pair off that well known auction site, and they are so thin that you can’t get any purchase on them. Complete waste of time.
Click to expand...
I hate to say "I told you so", but...

Anyway, glad you've "resolved" it, even though it wasn't the way you would ideally have done it.
 
Given everything you had tried, well done for taking the solution you did in the end. I would probably have kept trying, ‘not to be defeated’ until I destroyed something and made it worse. You’ve shown greater restraint that I would have and I should learn from it. good job!
 
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