I did something really stupid on Sunday while up in Jim Thorpe: I dropped my camera. I brought it with me to take on the trails and as I was taking it out of the car, the strap got caught on something and it pulled the camera right out of my hands. It fell upside down on top of the flash housing.

The most obvious damage occurred to the built-in flash. The little plastic hook that releases the flash and allows it to pop up had broken off, so the flash doesn’t stay down anymore. After checking the camera over I realized there was other damage to the flash that was now keeping it from firing. Thankfully everything else seems ok.

This evening I took apart the flash housing to see what was going on and I realized that the flash is still functioning, but that another plastic component had broken off, keeping a connection from being made. There are two little metal contacts that look like they should be pulled together when the flash pops up. When I do this with a pair of tweezers it does what it’s supposed to and fires. If I want to get this working again I’ll have to figure out a way to get these two contacts touching.

The set of contacts are towards the bottom of the exposed flash housing:

The little rectangular hole here is where the plastic hook should be:

Photos courtesy of my old Nikon 990 that I took out of storage.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 10:20 pm and is filed under Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.