Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Having figured out what to do, I started with the button, which is chromed plastic, nothing too fancy, and not at all hard to machine.
Laser Aligning to the Button Stem
A small post turned from an acrylic rod (the gray cylinder) supports the button in the Sherline 3-jaw chuck attached to the mill table; that was the only way to keep it reasonably level. Laser alignment got eyeballometrically close to the middle; it looks a bit off to the right, but the end result was OK.
Removing the Broken Stem
A 2 mm end-cutting bit chewed off the stem in short order; I set the jog speed to about 100 mm/min and just jogged down until the cutter was flush with the button. Spindle at 4000 rpm, for lack of anything smarter.
I decided to go with a 1-72 brass machine screw, which is slightly larger (1.75 mm) than the original 1.5 mm button stem. That means I must drill out the bezel hole, as well, but the 1.5 mm diameter of the next-smaller 0-80 screws in my assortment was a sloppy fit.
A touch of manual CNC for the drilling, #53 with the spindle at 3000 rpm, Z touched off at the button’s surface:
G81 Z-4 R3 F150
The spindle was slow enough and the feed fast enough to keep from melting the button without applying any coolant.
I tapped the hole 1-72 by simply screwing the tap in with my fingers…
Chuck-in-chuck For Head Shaping
The 3-jaw lathe chuck doesn’t grip a 1-72 screw (no surprise there), so I grabbed the screw in the Sherline’s smallest drill chuck and poked that in the lathe. This doesn’t make for great concentricity, but it was close enough. The right way, as my buddy Eks reminds me, is to slit a nested bunch of brass tubing and use them as collets, but … next time, fer shure.
Button With Reshaped Screw Head
Anyhow, here’s what the button & screw look like so far. The backside of the screw head looks like it needs some cleanup; there’s nothing like taking a picture to reveal that sort of thing.
The pencil lead is 0.5 mm and the grid in the background has 1 mm squares, just to give you an idea of the scale.
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.”
The Butterfly Bush is attracting all manner of insects, including these bumblebees. It looks like one is gathering propolis, as the stuff on her back leg looks sticky rather than grainy.
Saw several of these critters on our tent while we were packing up in the morning; I’m in favor of anything that eats small insects, so Harvestmen get a pass. I don’t know if those frogs eat ’em, but that’s something they can work out without my attention.
Then I found another Harvestman on a window when we got home. Not having seen the underside of one in quite a while, I was struck by the “alien face” pattern. I suppose the reddish dot under the alien’s nose is the Harvestman’s mouth, just like it looks.
Eeeek!
They’re actually pleasant to have around and tickle mightily when they crawl up your arm. We gently deport them from the house and generally manage to deposit them undamaged on a plant, where we presume they’ll be much happier.
So we did the HersheyPark thing on the way back from our bicycling vacation and our young lady rode seven of their eleven roller coasters. Not being all that strong of stomach, I wimped out after two and contented myself with taking pictures.
I had decided to not lug a Big Camera and the tele-adapter along, seeing as how we’d be camping for four nights. That turned out to be a wise decision: it rained every night and everything we carried was damp. So I took pix with my Casio Z-850 pocket camera, which had been sealed in a ziplock bag most of the time, and that had to be good enough.
The Fahrenheit coaster is, they tell me, 121 feet tall and I was standing outside the fence about 100 feet from the base of the drop; the slant range was maybe 150 feet. I had plenty of time to set up and practice the shot, as the line was half an hour long. I filled the equivalent of two rolls of film with pix of people I don’t know while exploring a nine-dimensional parameter space & scrutinizing the results; pixels are cheap.
Most digital cameras, this one included, have a long delay between pushing the button and getting results. However, it has several “continuous shutter” modes and I picked the “high-speed” version that records three images in quick succession. There’s no indication of how much time passes between exposures, which probably depends more on the SD Card’s speed than anything else. The timestamp resolution is 1 second, which isn’t much help.
Anyhow, poking the shutter button when the train came over the top consistently produced one good picture as it descended.
Continuous Shutter Images
I fought all the other automation to a standstill:
Infinity focus
Shutter speed 1/1000 sec
Aperture f/5.1
The camera picked ISO 200, probably as a result of the “high speed” continuous shutter setting, and warned me that it wasn’t happy about doing that. This being a bright, sunlit day, the nominal exposure for that ISO speed would be 1/200 @ f/16. Two stops faster shutter and three stops bigger aperture should work out OK, as the subjects were on the down-sun side of the coaster. The camera has just two apertures (big and little) that, of course, vary with the zoom setting, so I didn’t have much leeway. I figured I could fix any minor exposure issues in the cough darkroom.
The tele end of the zoom range is equivalent to a 114 mm lens with 35 mm film, which is better than the beer-can-sized zoom on the SLR I used to lug around back in the day.
In round numbers:
the car is 30 feet long and the original image is two cars tall, call it 60 feet
the image is 2816 pixels tall
(60 * 12) / 2800 = maybe 1/4″ per pixel
Cropping the interesting part from the frame, goosing the gamma a smidge, and applying a touch of Unsharp Mask says that’s about right: you can see the expressions on their grainy little faces. National Geographic quality, it ain’t, but it’s OK for a pocket camera and pix of relatives.
Memo to Self: Would forcing the ISO down to 100 reduce the graininess a bit?
It’s that time of the year again: a pair of hens and about a dozen chicks have been cruising through the yard. The chicks vary from softball- to football-sized, so we think the hens are tending a creche.
The chicks are, of course, insufferably cute…
We haven’t seen a hen with chicks roosting in the trees this year, but that just means they’re using trees near the creek rather than ones we can see from the house.
Tom Turkey Closeup
That cute thing the chicks have going for them tapers off pretty quickly as they grow up.
Wow, are those big toms ugly!
But it works well enough for turkeys, so who are we to complain?
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 