Category: Home Ec

The story so far: Damage Assessment and Button Milling.

Some key distances:

• Bezel bottom 3.3 mm thick, excluding depression on bottom surface
• Screw head sticks out of depression 0.9 mm

Some deft work on the bezel installed in the camera, using the blunt end of a transfer punch, a pin vise, and a calculator reveals these protrusions:

• 1.4 mm does not trigger anything
• 2.1 mm triggers the half-pushed focus action
• 2.4 mm reliably triggers the shutter

So the new stem can stick out about 1.4 mm when the button is released and must not stick out more than 2.4 mm with the button fully depressed: a whopping 1 mm of travel!

Eyeballing the shutter release on my DSC-H5, that seems to be about right. I think it has more travel between “released” and “half pressed” than those measurements indicate, but it’s close. And sloppy, too: the H5’s button has a lot of side-to-side wobble, indicating that the stem is not a close fit in the bezel hole.

The screw head is 3 mm dia after being turned down and that’s about the right size for the nut that will adjust the travel distance, as it must fit into the recess in the bezel. The nut sets the protrusion when the shutter button is released: 1.4 mm.

The distance from the shutter button’s bottom to the bezel sets the travel from “released” to “click”: 1 mm, more or less. They’re held apart by the spring, so that’s the default state.

I re-centered the 3-jaw chuck under the spindle, put a 1-72 nut on the turned-down screw, and applied some gentle manual CNC to convert the nut from a hex to a disk. The trick is to approach the nut from the right side (the +X side) and go clockwise around it (climb milling), so that the cutting force tends to jam the nut against the screw head. Do it the other way and the nut will zip downward away from the cutter

Surprisingly, I got that right the first time.

Using a 2 mm end mill and figuring a 2.9 mm final diameter, the radius of the circle to move the end mill around the nut is:
R = (2.9 + 2.0) / 2
So the G-code for one pass looks like:

#<R>=[[2.9+2.0]/2]
G1 X#<R> F150
G2 I[0-#<R>]

Now, given the fragility of that setup, you don’t cut it all at once. You start from a diameter of maybe 4 mm and go down by 0.2 mm until you hit 3.0, then make a final pass at 2.9 mm. EMC2’s AXIS MDI mode makes this easy enough: type in the commands for a pass at 4.0 mm, then click on the previous command, change 4.0 to 3.8, and then just clickety-click.

Spindle far too slow at 3000 RPM, feed at 150 mm/min seemed fine. Sissy cuts worked out OK.

After the first few passes, my dim consciousness became aware of the fact that this is how I should have turned down the screw head…

I cleaned up the bezel by putting it in an ultrasonic cleaner to shake the crud off, put it on a warm firewall router overnight to dry it out, then slobbered some Plastruct solvent adhesive into the cracks and clamped it for another night. The bezel was slightly out-of-round from the damage, so I hand-trimmed the bent plastic using a “high speed cutter” (#193, basically an end mill) in a Dremel flexible shaft at about 1/3 max speed until the shutter button bottomed out smoothly within the inner recess. Not a bit of CNC to be seen: hand held all the way.

Then loosen the nut a bit, poke the screw through the bezel, put the spring on, and screw the shutter button in place. Adjust the nut so the screw head is 1.4 – 1.5 mm from the bottom of the bezel with the nut resting in the recess.

Twiddle the shutter button until the screw head protrudes 2.4 mm from the bezel with the button pressed down.

That’s measured with the hole-depth tang of a caliper, sitting atop the screw head. I don’t believe there’s 0.1 mm accuracy in the measurements, but they’re close enough. I did file off a few mold flash bumps from the shutter button & bezel during this adventure.

Mark the screw threads above the button, unscrew it, chop the screw off with a stout diagonal cutter (it’s brass and not very thick, it’s OK), file the end flat, clean up the threads.

The trick seems to be that the button must rest just below the inner ring of the bezel, so that it bottoms out smoothly when pressed. If it’s above the ring, then one side will hang up. The ring depth thus seems to limit the maximum travel, although I can’t say whether this is the way it’s supposed to work or not.

I iterated & filed until the screw was flush with the top of the button with it screwed down to the proper position. It helped to figure out that one turn of the shutter button on the screw changed the “pressed” protrusion by 1/72″ = 0.35 mm.

Urge some low-strength Loctite under the nut and into the shutter button’s hole, reassemble everything, and you’re done.

The fall bent the bezel tabs so they no longer latch firmly in the camera body. I put two dabs of urethane adhesive on the socket in the body. The adhesive expands (foams!) as it cures; I hope it will lock the bezel in place while still allowing it to be removed if needed.

I dabbed off most of the adhesive you see in the picture before installing the bezel; it’s not as awful as it looks!

The final result has slightly less travel than the (undamaged, original) shutter button in my DSC-H5, but it works perfectly: half-press to focus, full press to trigger the shutter.