Repair Your Own Camera Lens

A couple weeks ago I tripped while on a hike and fell flat on my face, with my camera strapped around my neck. Unluckily, the lens hood got pushed up onto the camera lens. Luckily, the hood absorbed the impact and protected the camera and lens from damage. The camera worked fine after I pried the damaged lens hood off, and I found a new lens hood on eBay. Unluckily, I took my camera out of the bag on Friday and the lens fell off.

The mounting plate on this lens is plastic, and it has (had) three bars that lock the lens to the camera.

Apparently, two of the bars broke when I hit the ground on the hiking trail.

I found one broken bar inside the camera, but the other is probably on the trail to Lake Blanche.

A new lens is about $350, so I had an ingenious idea: get a brass plate at the hobby store, cut a new locking bar, and epoxy it into the lens. I used the existing bar as a template.

My handy dandy Dremel tool cut the new piece.

I sanded to the exact size of the existing piece, including sanding down to the correct thickness.

I carefully fitted the piece into the lens, marking in tiny increments where I still needed to grind down to match where the original piece had left jagged edges. Then I hand sanded the piece using 400-grit wet-dry sand paper so it would be nice and smooth. This whole process took about three hours.

That's all the pictures you get. I epoxied the two pieces (the found piece and the brass piece I made) into the lens and waited 24 hours for the epoxy to fully cure.

Then I tested the camera, and voila, it didn't work. The aperture wouldn't adjust and returned an error message. I think my ingenious brass piece may have interfered with the electrical terminals just above it, even though they weren't touching.

Anyway, I found out that I can order a whole new mounting plate from Nikon for about $30.

In the mean time, I pried out the brass piece, but the aperture still didn't work. So I disassembled the whole back end of the lens; broke a tiny little wire and resoldered it; lost a screw that took a flashlight, a magnifying glass, and about 15 minutes to find; and forgot how all the pieces went back together (I screwed one tiny piece onto a mounting plate upside down and then couldn't figure out why it wouldn't fit on the lens). But I did get it back together, and it now seems to be working okay with two of the three locking bars in place and a functioning aperture. I'm hoping that holds until Nikon sends me a replacement plate.

The moral of the story is, well, I don't know what the moral is. Something about, If you have the choice between mowing the lawn and diving into some project where you have no expertise, mow the lawn.