Lately I have been very interested in making my own lenses. Right know I have lying around these ones:

Canon Zoom lens EF III 35-80mm
Canon Zoom lens EF-S II 18-55mm
A Schneider-kreuznach symmar 1:12 265 http://www.pbase.com/hegars/image/45562762
A Schneider-Kreuznach Tele-Arton 1:5.5/270 lens. A friend told me I can seel this one for $200 but honestly who is interested in such and old lens?

Any ideas?

Also I would like to know how to make my own tinted filters.

The 35-80mm is not wide enough to me.  The 18-55mm is crapy. Worse than the 18-55mm from Nikkor
Schneider used to be very good if I remember correctly but I cant tell about these lens

And about the filter, why don't you just buy some.  they are so cheap now that film camera is almost dead... ppl are selling all their tinted lens

Remember that I live in mexico, mate. It was already hard to find filters back in the day.

Well. I have been doing some progress. So far I have scaterred some glass and I already got some... interesting results. If someone knows about it please post.

you could end up with something neat, but really, the chance of it's pretty low. Lenses are made by professional companies because they are in dust free environments, and they have the know-how to figure out what size/shape/how many/shape of glass there needs to be in the lens.

If he is making his own lens, I doubt he is going for perfect quality. You will get some really unique results from messing around with your lens.

I read about combining the kit 18-55mm lens with the 50mm 1.8 to make a tilt shift lens. I believe it was on Hack-a-day.

Post some photos you have took with your creation when you can!

Exactly. I am aiming for distorted effects. Not sharp quality.

So far the progress has been slow. I want to create durable bodies for the lenses. Unlike the ones made with plastic bags in the tutorials.

So far I have achieved some... strange results.

A quick pic showing some results. Here you can see how some parts of the wall and the lamp are focused while the out of focus area expands quickly and generate a big contrast.

Very interesting, I am curious to see how this turns out.

I dropped my camera (I am not a ditz either, but it happened) and it bent the front of my 18-55. The lens doesn't work any more as far as auto focusing and zooming. However, the front of the lens which is used for focusing is bent at an angle, creating a tilt/shift effect. I haven't played around with it that much though.