A while ago my daughter’s Canon A60 would not turn on: the dreaded E18 error struck and the barrel was not extending. So with nothing to lose, I took it apart, carefully labelled each of the 33 tiny screws I removed, and killed it. I wasn’t trying to kill it, but I managed to break one of the thin, flat cables in trying to get to the mechanical problem of the jamming barrel.

The root cause, I figured out, was a lack of lubrication between two plastic parts. As the barrel retracted the parts slid over each other and operated a spring-loaded mechanism that kept the shutters apart that cover the lens. Too much friction and the motor couldn’t make it work before the CPU recognized there was a problem and stopped trying. So far so good with all the other Canon equipment in the house.

The photo above isn’t from that particular incident. That’s Sam taking apart a Canon 17-85 that stopped working. I also found some interesting photos of the IS unit of a 70-200 that Ken Phillips took apart to fix.

Flickr has a whole pile of people taking cameras of all sorts apart: here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Tags: Photography, Lenses, Cameras, Canon, Bugs