The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Category: Home Ec

Things around the home & hearth

Sony DSC-H1 Shutter Button Repair: Damage Assessment
Camera Body Damage

My brother-in-law Tee dropped his Sony DSC-H1 camera, which landed atop its shutter button on the pavement.

Bad news…
- the shutter button broke off
- the bezel popped out
- the teeny little snap ring that held the shutter button stem in the bezel vanished, because…
- the stem broke and the end vanished, too
Good news…
- apart from some scuffs, the camera still works
- he managed to find the shutter button
- and the button bezel
- and the spring!
Shutter Button – Spring – Bezel

A bit of browsing reveals that many, many Sony DSC-Hx (where x is an integer from 1 through 9, inclusive) owners have the same problem, minus the inconvenience & embarrassment of first dropping the camera. Turns out that the shutter button stem breaks at that notch in normal use.

It seems the stem snaps while you’re taking pix, whereupon the spring launches itself and the button cap into the nearest river / drain grate / weedy area, never to be seen again. Tee is exceedingly fortunate to have found all the major pieces!

Shutter Button Stem – End View.

Here’s the broken end of the stem, with the button cap out of focus in the background. The stem is 1.5 mm in diameter, so the snap ring was surrounding, what, 0.75 mm of plastic? In what alternate universe did this design decision make sense?

I think the snap ring contributed to the problem by eroding the stem in the notch; that little white stub isn’t half of the stem diameter; it may have stretched under impact, but surely not all that much.

Yes, you can buy a replacement button for about 30 bucks direct from Sony, but it seems the new stem is subject to the same failure after a short while. They’re standing by the original design, marginal though it may be.

Now, obviously, this stem failed from abuse, no argument there. Everybody else had their stem fail without provocation, though, so it really isn’t adequate to the task at hand.

Bezel Socket View

Anyhow, there’s also some damage at the bezel socket on the camera body, but nothing major. The dented silver areas on either side of the switch membrane are ESD shields, so that any static discharge from your finger will (most likely) dissipate on the external frame of the camera, rather than burrow into its guts via the switch.

The bezel twist-locks into the camera body, which means that you can remove the bezel if you can get a good grip on it. It turns clockwise to remove.

Shutter Switch Closeup

Peering closer at the membrane switch, it looks as though the button stem did some damage on its way out, although Tee admits to using various pointy objects to trigger the shutter while figuring out what to do with the camera.

More good news: the switch still works correctly, including the focus function with the button half-pressed, That means the switch membrane and contacts are in good shape.

Bezel – Top View

The bezel itself is pretty well graunched, with a nest of cracks underneath that damaged arc to the left of the pictures. I think it’s in good enough condition that I can remove the bent plastic, ooze some solvent adhesive into the damage, and compress it enough to make everything stick together.

Bezel – Side View

Obviously, this calls for some Quality Shop Time!

The overall plan is to remove the remaining stem from the button, drill-and-tap the button head for a miniature brass screw (1-72, I think), reshape the screw head into a membrane-friendly plunger (about 3 mm diameter and flat), then put it all back together with a nut in place of the snap ring.

I should be able to install the bezel (without the button), then insert some drill rod through the hole to figure out how far the screw must protrude to trigger the focus & shutter switches. Perhaps a pin vise will grip the drill rod and bottom out on the bezel’s central ring, so I can do a trial-and-error fitting?

Then I can adjust the screw to that overall length below the bezel with the button pressed, whack off anything that sticks out above the button, adjust the nut to limit the button’s outward travel, slobber Loctite over everything, and put it all together for the last time.

That’s the plan, anyway. As the Yiddish proverb has it, “If you wish to hear G*d laugh, tell him your plans.”

Some useful dimensions…

Button Dimensions

The rest of the story…

Rebuilding the button

Putting it all back together again
2009-08-27
Tour Easy Zzipper Fairing Wrappers: “Bubble Wrap”

Tour Easy Zzipper Fairing Wrappers

We spent four days biking along the Pine Creek Valley rail trail with a Rails-to-Trails Conservancy group ride on our Tour Easy recumbent bikes. Because a crushed-stone path creates a lot of noise that the fairings direct right into our ears and because we weren’t going very fast, we left the fairings at home. As a result, the bikes were wonderfully quiet.

Some years ago, Mary sewed up “bubble wraps” to store our fairings on those rare occasions when they’re not on the bikes. She had some red flannel left over from another project and a hank of cheery Christmas-themed edging, so they turned out to be rather conspicuous.

The trick is to get the size right when the fairing is rolled up. With the fairing in its natural bubble shape, the wrap is rather limp, so you need pockets on both ends to hold the wrap in place. The toes are, she admits, an affectation, but didn’t take much figuring to get right. The width is just slightly more than the fairing’s flat width; you find that by rolling it up and measuring the roll.

She actually made a paper template first to sort out all the curves, then transferred that to the flannel for final cutting.

Tuck in the fairing’s head & toes, roll it up toes first, tie the (attached) strap in a neat bow, and it’s done!

We have three fairings and they roll up together, each in its own wrap, into one tidy, albeit rather heavy, package.

2009-08-07
Bicycle Water Bottle Cap: Relaxed

Water bottle cap

Being cyclists, we were doing the resuable-water-bottle thing long before it became trendy, but now that we use hydration packs, we just tote bottles along when we’re driving or on some other sort of outing. Eventually the bottles wear out / get lost and we page a new one in from the essentially infinite stash in the bottle cupboard.

This one had a cap that simply couldn’t be pried open with bare hands, no how, no way. I eventually got it open by main force and the threat of high temperatures.

Turns out there were two problems: the aperture in the pull-up ring is a wee bit small on the sealing nub and the ridge on the screw cap is about two wee bits large for the recess in the ring.

The former succumbed to an O (letter Oh) drill, which I pulled & pushed through the hole by hand to enlarge the aperture from 0.320 to 0.332. It still seals reasonably well, although it’ll pee a thin stream under more pressure than you should apply to such a bottle, which means I put a slight scratch on the aperture.

The latter required gently shaving the ridge with a box cutter (gasp). It’s still rather stiff, but entirely workable. That doesn’t affect the seal, because the ring’s skirt is a snug fit against the screw cap.

Why not just throw the fool thing out? After all, it’s just a freebie water bottle…

We run on the “Use it up, wear it out, fix it once, wear it out again, then put it on the shelf because maybe you can use the parts for something” principle.

Now, that’s not the way things are done these days, but it works for us…

2009-07-28
Pressure-washing the Gas Grill: Mind the Overspray

The instructions for our Weber gas grill would have us lavish more care on it than we do on our car, which isn’t actually saying much. Nonetheless, once a year I gotta clean the crud out, whether it needs it or not, because not even I believe heat kills that stuff.

Used to be, that was a thoroughly disgusting job of hand-scraping carbonized gunk and scrubbing gooey muck in cramped quarters. Having acquired a pressure washer, cleaning the grill is almost enough fun that I might do it more often. It even gets the mildew (or whatever that schmutz might be) off the wood handles & platforms, which I would have bet was impossible.

Pressure washer side effects

However, if you’re even a teensy bit fussier than we are about the looks of your castle, you might want to not lay the grates & “flavorizer bars” on the driveway to blast ’em clean. Turns out that the overspray strips the grunge right out of the top layer of asphalt, leaving a white trail behind.

Looks a lot like those Nasca peteroglyphs, doesn’t it?

The pressure washer does a great job on the white resin plastic chairs, too, which go from really grubby to chalk-white in one pass.

Can’t imagine how I got along without it…

Memo to Self: Next time, use the sawhorses.

2009-07-22
Batteries.com Alkaline AA Cells: Early Failures Thereof

Swollen vs normal alkaline AA cells

I’ve bought plenty of batteries from batteries.com over the years, but the alkaline AA cells I picked up last year have been a real disappointment: some had very short service lives. It took quite a while to figure this out, as I mentioned there, and when I finally got around to checking the rest of the package, most of them were dead… in Spring 2009 with a 12-2012 date code.

One characteristic of the weak / dead cells is that the negative terminal is swollen, even on the deaders direct from the package. This picture shows four cells removed from service: the front two are used with some remaining charge, the rear two are dead.

When I checked the package, most of the dead-on-delivery cells had swollen bottoms, so I suspect they had a manufacturing problem with at least one batch of cells.

A query to batteries.com asking about this got no reply. Perhaps they were busy dealing with the aftermath of their security breach?

A 48-pack of alkaline cells from the late Circuit City, bought about the same time, seems just fine.

Memo to self: check the bottom!

2009-07-19
LED Flashlight Lens Protector

Inova X1 lens protector

Some years ago, a friend convinced me I needed an Inova X1 LED flashlight. He was right; I’ve carried one in my belt pack ever since and, in fact, added a couple of X5s to the household armory.

Perforce, this is an old X1 with a coated glass lens to make the best of the LED. Newer X1s don’t have (or, likely) need the lens, as LED technology has made great strides in the last few years.

I couldn’t bear the thought of that lens rattling around in my belt pack, chewed upon by the assortment of other crap in there. So I made a lens protector: a length of heatshrink tubing with a polypropylene window. You might want to do the same for your flashlight to keep from grinding up the optical surfaces on its shiny end.

This tubing has an internal thermoplastic glue, but ordinary tubing would likely work as well. Position the tubing over the end of the flashlight with a few millimeters sticking out. Cut a circle from the clamshell case around some piece of consumer electronics, drop it on top of the lens, and shrink the tubing around the flashlight: watch it wrap right over the end and hold the circle in place. A dot or three of urethane glue may help for glue-less tubing.

It’s transparent enough for most purposes, but when you really need more light or a tighter beam, pull it off. That’s aided by dabbing a trace of oil on the X1, which you can get directly from the (outside) of your nose. Yeah, gross, but it’s a renewable natural resource…

2009-07-13
Rudy Sunglasses Repair: Stress Cracking

Rudy sunglasses stress cracking – left

Rudy sunglasses stress cracking – right

Mary dropped a pair of her sunglasses that disintegrated on impact: both earpieces broke off. She has trouble finding sunglasses that fit, so this is not to be taken lightly…

The sunglasses had interchangeable lenses, a feature which she’d never used, and the lower of the two tabs that snapped into the earpieces had broken off — on both sides, simultaneously. These weren’t high-snoot items, but they were name-brand: Rudy Project from, IIRC, nashbar.com.

Peering through the microscope, it turns out that the lens material may have been pretty good optically, but wasn’t up to the mechanical task: the two remaining tabs had deep stress cracks. The right-side picture shows the lens upside-down, as that was the easiest way to set up the shot.

Notice the many, many cracks that penetrate nearly all the way through the tabs. The tabs didn’t break because she dropped the glasses on the floor, they broke because there was barely anything left holding the tabs in place.

Mind you, she’d never removed the lenses from the earpieces, so this isn’t a case of failure-from-overuse, either. They’re about a year old, more or less, and have been used in stressful tasks like gardening and the occasional bike ride.

Urethane adhesive foam-in-place

I slobbered urethane glue into the ends of the earpieces to mechanically lock the remaining tabs in place and fill all the voids. It looks rather ugly here, but the excess adhesive simply snaps off because it doesn’t chemically bond with either of the other two plastics.

Rudy sunglasses stress cracking – center

After screwing everything back together again, I noticed that there’s another stress crack growing in the middle of the lens, just over the nosepiece. These sunglasses are not long for this world: that failure will be an end-of-life event.

The frames claim “Designed in Italy” which doesn’t win any points with me; the design is fundamentally flawed.

Yo, Rudy, how about designing some sunglasses with a high-tech feature like durability… rather than style?

Oh, yeah, I suppose this repair voids the Warranty. Perhaps buying from Nashbar on sale triggers this clause: “Buying Rudy Project sunglasses, goggles or helmets from an online retailer at a price below the suggested retail price (MSRP) voids your warranty.” The expense of sending them in negates any possible benefit, which I’m sure they realize, too.

2009-07-06