Sometimes I think that the engineers used a good part of their intelligence to make their jobs as difficult as possible for entire generations of repairmen
To troubleshoot the boards, the underside would need to be visible, yet, they would need to be hooked up to all the potentiometers and switches in the camera body.
Much can be repaired if you are willing to invest the time, but it may not be financially rewarding.
Sometimes I think that the engineers used a good part of their intelligence to make their jobs as difficult as possible for entire generations of repairmen
I worked for a repair tech who was very knowledgeable about these kinds of circuits. He had started in the '70s so pretty much 'grew up' on the kind of cameras you are looking at. From what I saw of his work, he would go into old circuitry if the solution was simple. He could troubleshoot bad capacitors, pots, etc. And if the circuit allows for simple repairs, he could do them, Swap out components from donor bodies. Jump around bad continuity, etc. But the bar was low- simple or it was either a plug and play/pray of a whole circuit or tell the customer that the camera was unrepairable. I don't think he was really tracing circuits out. Just grabbing the obvious issues if need be, using factory manual troubleshooting keys, etc. And most of those factory manuals will, as people have been saying, often end with 'if a, install new X, thank you good bye.
And this was someone who did understand these circuits and knew how to deal with multilayer boards, etc. As people have been saying, you may be expecting more detailed repair work than was the norm in the past.
On the documentation front, I remember that he had a disk full full full of factory camera manuals. So the material has been digitized (well, jpegs of manual pages, not true digital searchable documents). You should keep asking old repair techs how to get your hands on this library. I imagine lots of hard disks have been sent to the dump already holding this stuff.
Of course it is impressive if you try to understand the circuitry of a current camera. But there's nothing left that requires you to be skilled at repairing things. Just replacing highly integrated modules. And don't ruin the case when you open it. But otherwise?… so the compact FF SLR blossomed in size into the godzilla dSLR, and we had to get rid of the reflex mirror to shrink the body in mirrorless.
Another is a complete reverse engineering of the original Pentax Electro-Spotmatic/ES, which was probably the most advanced electronic camera when it was introduced:
Can floppy disk drives still be managed by current versions of Windows? Or did the manufacturers use other operating systems?Another issue with the last generation of automatic film cameras is the need for dedicated software. This is further confounded by the likely need to boot into legacy computer hardware.
I suspect these service floppy disks are not available as the independent Nikon service facilities will still service these cameras. I'd say that is a good thing for now.
View attachment 352782
But more importantly, with a mechanical camera, it is much easier to work on component parts of the system. If a mechanical shutter is jammed, I can disassemble the camera and actuate the shutter until I see the problem. I can even dial in curtain speeds and slit widths without reassembling. If an electronic shutter is jammed, I can disassemble the camera but I can't fire the shutter without special tools. In the past, camera companies would supply techs with the proprietary tools to do this (like what ic-racer posted), but they aren't really available any more. All you can do is clean the shutter, then reassemble the entire camera and hope it works. Same is true for a lot of the other electronic functions of the camera.
Can floppy disk drives still be managed by current versions of Windows?
Although people get stressed out about the undocumented, complicated, and unreplaceable parts (eg the microcontroller that might exist in a camera or amplifier), IME those are rarely the parts that fail. For a few cameras there are known failure points that are discussed on the web, for example the capacitor that goes bad in some Minoltas (as posted by the OP in another thread), and a known replacement procedure.
Can floppy disk drives still be managed by current versions of Windows? Or did the manufacturers use other operating systems?
I think this is the key to not giving up when you have problems with the electronics of the Minolta X cameras. Because ICs can only be unsoldered as spare parts from abandoned Minoltas, which is not easy due to their size and neighboring components. The soldering is then added.
ChipQuik solder can be very helpful in some situations: It's a special bismuth alloy which remains molten long enough that parts can simply be lifted away without damage.
The common method of (de)soldering such packages is to use a hot air soldering station. They're quite affordable these days. Works for small lead-less packages as well (QFN).
What would be the guidelines for the temperature setting and application time?
Depends. If it takes too long, turn up heat. Depends a lot on substrate, mass of the IC, surface area, solder used etc. etc. Of course try and use as little heat as possible.
Btw, before I had the hot air thing I used a butane lighter many times. Never damaged the internals of any component with it. But the hot air station foesn scorch the package, and there's less risk of pads lifting. It's been a while since I damages any pads or traces; it only tends to happen with lots and lots of rework and mostly with the soldering iron, and never the hot air station.
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?