I tried and failed to fix a broken gear I found deep inside my old broken point-and-shoot digital camera. I tried to take it apart non-destructively because there was a small chance I could fix it. Unlikely, given the tiny mechanisms within, but there was a chance. I thought it was more likely that I would find a fault that I couldn't fix, or that I couldn't find anything at all, at which point I would proceed to completely disassemble it for the sake of curiosity.

But now that I have tried and failed to fix the fault, I found myself unwilling to move on to destructive disassembly. I didn't feel it was a "well, that's that" situation. This feels just barely beyond my reach, and I should be able to think of something in the near future. I'm not ready to give up yet!

This leaves me in an awkward state: I don't have any more repair ideas to try right now, and I have a lot of scattered camera pieces in front of me. Their current positions on my workbench are a direct reflection of how those pieces fit into each other. If I sweep them into a bag, I will not be able to put this thing back together. With that in mind, I decided to reassemble the camera so I could clear my workbench for other projects until I return to this thing with a new idea.

Manually turning gears tiny bit by bit, I retracted the lens mechanism before putting it back together. Then I electrically connected the assembly to the rest of the camera in a test run configuration:

Typically the lens assembly is in the middle, blocked in by the flash module and other pieces. I don't want to assemble/reassemble all adjacent pieces every time I want to test something, so I came up with this arrangement. It allows every electronic connector to be plugged in to their right places, but leaves the lens assembly dangling out front so I could easily unplug it. This configuration is a lot more awkward than doing the same thing with an inkjet printer, because every cable is short and have very little slack.

A rear view of this awkward arrangement. This could be a lot neater if there wasn't a tiny cable connecting LCD to flash module in addition to the wide LCD cable at the bottom. But this is the view I have for verifying I still get "Lens error, restart camera" on screen. While I haven't fixed the camera, the good news is I haven't catastrophically damaged anything else either. The bad news is that my laboriously hand-retracted lens was deployed again during startup. Gah! Given the effort it took to manually retract, and the risk I'll break something if I were to go back in and do it again while frustrated, I decided to just leave the lens extended and resolved to be careful putting this away.

An hour later, I have the camera mostly back together. There were a few pieces of double-sided tape that didn't hold as it used to, and there were two plastic clips I inadvertently broke when I pulled the lens assembly apart. At the end, I found myself with one extra screw left over despite my notes, pictures, and physical reminder via workbench layout. I don't remember where this one screw was supposed to go, and couldn't find a likely place for a missing fastener. Ending with a single extra screw isn't terrible for a beginner but it shows I have a long way to go before I can be trusted for actual camera repairs!