Fix your lens. Yourself.

Things tends to be malignant. That's it. I learned it once more on the very first day of my vacation when I lost autofocus in my camera. I bought it about 8 years ago, so I'm not complaining. It served me well, but couldn't that happen a few days later?

At the end it wasn't so bad. My lens was still turning automatically in one direction. With that being said, I was able to use semi-auto-focus - just turn my lens manually in counter-focus direction, then half-press the shutter to focus. Sometimes I had to do this multiple times, but still better than nothing. And the pictures I took were not too bad anyway.

When I got back home I googled a little bit around and realized that I have three options:

1) Sell this camera body with broken lens as is. I was thinking about replacing it anyway.

2) Fix it in service - it should be no more than $70
3) Fix it myself - sounds like a challenge. And should cost around $7

What choice did I really have? :-)

Found this great tutorial on youtube and disassembly went pretty smooth. I identified broken flex cable and I ordered one on the internet. I put every part of my lens to the box for a week waiting for delivery. Once I got it I was waiting for a good moment to assembly things back again. Then I realized that I screw up. I should have wait with disassembly of my lens until the cable arrives, because during the week I just forgot order of operations and which screw I should use to secure which part. 

So I was kind of stuck with something like this on the table:

Ok, where to start? Again, I used second part of great tutorial I've found. The only problem I had was that disassembly went so smooth, that I decided to go a few steps further than tutorial and I just disassembled everything. Good news - it was much easier to replace the cable, because I had interesting part completely removed from lens body. Bad news - I had no idea how to put it back together. So I just started with broken cable replacement.

        

Then I spent another two hours trying to find out how to put all the things together to reflect the state of the lens from the beginning of second part of tutorial. It was quite frustrating, because every time I managed to put things together so I was able to turn around focus or zoom and lens behaved like it should, later on it revealed that parts were not aligned properly and I had to start from the beginning. Go figure.

When I finally understood logic of all moving parts and put it together properly, I just followed that lovely tutorial. It might be a little better quality, but it's good enough if you watch it carefully.

Good progress

Keep it up!

Almost there.

Yup, almost there. Just put back PCB, connect flex cables without damaging them, close the corps and... good to go?

Ready, steady?

You can only imagine how good I felt once I realized that it actually works!

If your lens ever happen to fail, you should fix it yourself. It's quite tricky and complicated to disassembly it and then put it back together, but it's definitely not a rocket science. 

Stay tuned, I have some significant progress on my Whitebox project to report!