Originally posted by ismaelg Steve Austin,
Astronaut
A man barely alive
Gentlemen, we can rebuild him...
One of my favorite intros of all time, of course back in the day I lived it in Spanish
So, after it was "pretty much done", the hot shoe and the sync port were acting up and got worst to the point they were not usable.
So here we go again!
Pardon the crappy cell phone pics but these were taken live from the Operating Room!
So after some troubleshooting I isolated the issue to the sync contacts operated by the opening curtain latching cam. The part was distorted out of shape. The gap was inconsistent. I was worried bending the part into shape may break it.
Maybe I can scavenge this part from the parts camera. WAIT! This
IS the parts camera!
I tried adding some extra support to the part but did not work.
At the end I carefully reshaped the part little by little adjusting the back contact, front contact, front contact support and latching cam itself. I honestly think I reinstalled, tested, disassembled back again, adjust and repeat well over a dozen times. My trusty Fluke-29 multimeter was there the whole time.
(As an electrical engineer I have literally trusted my life to that instrument more times than I can count in the last 25 years or so.)
The gap is finally correct and consistent. The wires broke (not surprisingly with all that handling) and had to be resoldered. Again, my soldering skills are not up to snuff and are just barely adequate.
But!
IT WORKS!
Fired hot shoe flash and sync port external flash over 10 consecutive times with 100% success!!!
I'll finish putting the whole camera back together again later in the week, hoping nothing else was broken
Thanks,
Ismael
Amazing! I'm as impressed by your trouble-shooting and diagnosis skills as I am your repair and restoration work, Ismael.
You've mentioned your soldering a couple of times... I wouldn't worry about it. So long as the joints are nice and shiny, that's all that counts, right?
It's not a beauty contest, and I've seen
far worse joints than that. You may or may not know that I'm an occasional amateur radio user, and there's a company called MFJ that makes a lot of accessories such as antenna tuners. The soldering in their products is legendary - in a bad way. I've had a couple of units from them where they simply didn't work out of the box due to obviously-dry joints or short-circuits from bridges of excess solder. Their products are pretty good, actually, but when buying them you need to assume they'll need thorough testing and - as likely as not - a bit of time with a soldering iron
Last edited by BigMackCam; 11-16-2021 at 07:02 AM.