My Canon PowerShot SD1100 IS digital point-and-shoot camera is currently broken. I found a broken gear that I feel I should be able to fix, but have not yet been able to. The fact it feels just out of reach made me reluctant to tear it completely apart for curiosity's sake, so I reassembled it to the best of my ability hoping to return to the topic in the near future. In the meantime, some updates on the topic:

SLA Printed Replacement Gear

I posted my broken gear on Mastodon, and among the responses are two opinions that it should be within my reach to 3D print a replacement gear. Not with the FDM printers I have, though. Printing at this scale requires SLA resin printers. Sample pictures of a figurine printed on a modern SLA printer shows amazing details, which is a promising start, but there's more to printing a functional gear than resolution. I'm concerned about dimensional accuracy because resin shrinks as it cures. Something not too critical in a decorative figurine, but very important for a gear. I have a SLA resin printer that's several generations behind the state of the art, and it has yet to print anything. This gear may be my motivation to finally set up a resin printing area to properly control all the nasty chemicals involved in SLA printing.

Sigma Lens Repair

With my introduction to photography equipment disassembly, I now have more interest in reading more about the topic. Hackaday article Broken Lens Provides Deep Dive Into Camera Repair pointed me to the write-up Sigma 45mm f/2.8 Lens Repair & Analysis. Even though I haven't used Sigma cameras or taken any of them apart, it looks like they share many fundamental similarities. Which included the incredibly intricate internals. Photography repair is not for the faint of heart... my eyes are too old to work at such scales unassisted. My budget digital microscope is a start, but I will need better gear if I want to get serious about camera repair.

JIS (Japanese Industrial Standard) Screw

A valuable lesson from the Sigma teardown document is my first introduction to screws of the Japanese Industrial Standard, which are common in photography equipment consistent with the fact a large fraction of the industry are Japanese brands. Officially designated JIS B 1012, they are superficially very similar to Philips fasteners but not exactly the same. Using a Philips driver in a JIS screw will usually work but risks damaging the screw when the going gets tough.

Odds are good that fasteners inside my Canon point-and-shoot camera are actually JIS screws, and I might have damaged a few of them during my teardown. Or have I? I took a closer look at my iFixit Mako driver kit. I remember thinking it was odd that there were two separate sets of Philips driver bits in there, it never occurred to me that one of them are actually JIS drivers until I checked them carefully and saw "J1" marked instead of "PH1" on a very similar driver. If it weren't for that marking, I would not have been able to tell them apart. The fact both types were in my driver kit, and that I didn't know they were different, meant there was a chance I accidentally used the correct JIS drivers for my camera teardown. If so, that would have been out of pure luck.