My pleasure, just forge ahead as long as due credit is paid
Here is the 360-1200mm f/11 Zoom-Nikkor ED AI, complete with the designated hood and the bespoke tripod mount for my Sachtler Fluid Head. Also shown is the "little" brother, the Zoom-Nikkor 180-600mm f/8 ED AI and a Df to illustrate the scale.
The 370-1200 was pristine and hardly ever used, it came in its original blue box with all the paperwork, and the reason it was sold as "junk" for cheap was a bad fungus infestation. Which turned out affected only a single lens surface and could easily be removed after judicious scrubbing with a windows cleaning liquid. The main effort was spent in redesigning the pitiful tripod mounting surface that was horribly under-dimensioned. I cannot imagine what the engineers at Nikon had in mind when they decided upon that design.
The 180-600 likewise was sold as "junk" for a pittance (USD 200 incl. shipping) and in this case, the description was apt. The zoom lens had been badly damaged by an incompetent repair tech who amongst other atrocities had destroyed the tripod mounting flange, got the focusing frozen stuck solid, and the lens could not form a coherent image at all. No fungus this time, though.
The tripod mounting issue was solved by drilling a beefy 5/8" hole to the remains of the foot and permanently affixing an Arca plate to it. Disassembling the lens indicated the lack of any image formation was due to a flipped lens element deep inside (if memory serves, no. 8 or 9) and the stuck focus was caused by the helicoids being put together in a slap-stick fashion. All that fixed and the lens was as good as new. It arrived without the correct lens hood, but I found a replacement that fitted exactly and had similar finish.
Adding CPUs to both lenses was my finishing touch.
