There are benefits...

...to being an engineer. Sure, you have to wear geeky glasses from a young age, under-perform in most sporting activites, sweat excessively in the presence of the fairer sex, wear clothes in style 10 years too late, and then there is the "utter social ineptitude." But occasionally, once in a great while, it pays off. You spend countless hours in your youth taking apart dad's old electric shaver or reading about the performance characteristics of WWII bombers, while all the other guys were honing their flirting skills or going to prom, knowing that someday your skills might come in handy. And today they did...

We recently got a new digital camera. Our old one stopped working one day, for no apparent reason. It was a Canon Elph PowerShot SD500 that we got from my mom a few Christmases ago. We turned it on, and the screen displayed "E18" (Error 18) and it refused to work. The lens would go in and out, but it wouldn't focus on anything. I did an internet search, and quickly found that Canon's are notorious for "Error 18" and that there were lots of suggestions on how to fix it. There are, in fact, entire web pages and message boards dedicated to this error. So I took our camera apart, but didn't manage to fix anything. I gave up in frustration, and we reverted to using another Canon Elph. This one we inherited from my sister when the LCD on the back of the camera broke. She gave it to me to take apart (see first paragraph) and when I did, I discovered I could pretty easily replace the LCD. So I fixed her camera with a $60 LCD, and had my own camera. It had a couple of dead pixels, and was an older camera, but was a good backup.

Anyways, back to the point. We got a new camera, but I realized that Paige will take it to Michigan this summer, and I would only have the old repaired Elph. Which was a bummer, because I plan to go hiking to some cool spots this summer when they are in Michigan, and wanted a decent camera to take pictures (we'll see if the hiking actually occurs... see engineer physical abilities above.) I called a local camera shop, and they wanted $300 to repair the camera. You can buy a brand new one for less than that. So I decided to take it apart one last time and see if I had better luck...

Here is how the camera was stuck, on or off...


Outer shell off...


Flash sub-assembly removed...


Lens sub-assembly. This is where the problem should be, since E18 is a lens error...


Lens assembly in half. The CCD is on the left, the heart of a digital camera. Hmmm, I still can't figure out what is wrong though...


Whoops! I didn't need to take the lens assembly apart. I found the focus lens drivetrain on the back. That little set of gears on the right is the issue. I found a single grain of sand stuck in the gear teeth, which was preventing the gears from turning. How that sand grain made it all the way into the camera, I have no idea...


Put it all back together...


Hmmm, I don't think it is a good thing when you have parts left over...


The moment of truth, will the thing actually work? Turn it on... and the LCD is completely black. No image at all. But hey, I don't get an "Error 18." Take it back apart again, and find that I didn't get the CCD cable plugged back in all the way. Reassemble it, and take a test picture...

(that would be the post I put up in the back yard)

Hey, I actually fixed it!