Dismantling 101

Two nights ago I decided to take matters in my own hands and did something I haven't done since grade school: dismantle a camera.

My first victim was my grandfather's vintage Kodak, one with the eyepiece located at the top and weighs about a quarter of a pound (back then, it was pretty heavy for me). I was grade three then, and with dreams of becoming an inventor, if not a robotics scientist.

And so when my grandfather gave the go signal for me to try and "repair" his camera, I wasted no time and attacked the poor thing with nothing but a pocketknife and lots of imagination.

Although it didn't get fixed, I ended up making an improvised periscope out of it, which became a big hit with my classmates because we can spy on the big house near our school without scaling their tall fence wall.

The second camera would be my recently damaged Nikon digicam. This time, though, I have system.

I learned in highschool CAT (Cadet Army Training) that the basics in dismantling any firearm is FOLI – First Out, Last In. There I learned to dismantle .45 caliber pistols, and the standard M-14 and M-16 rifles. I remember our humble squad winning the mini-competition in CAT, where each one of us dismantled the firearms in the shortest time, in blindfolds.

And so two nights ago, just like my grandfather's Kodak, the poor Nikon digicam looked like a sacrificial lamb on my worktable -- ready to be slaughtered, and has resigned its fate to unlearned hands.

But I was determined not to turn it into another periscope or something, and I've armed myself with a complete set of precision screwdrivers, brush cleaners, super glue, and dust blower, with a soldering gun at a standby.

It took me about an hour to crack it open and strip it down to its barest essentials. The culprit was a tiny speck of Pagudpud sand lodged deep within the lens mechanism. I have to remove most of the gears to get the sucker off and give the whole thing a thorough dusting and cleaning.

Dismantling the camera was easy enough. The real challenge for me was putting it back together.

I wonder how many watches, toys, clocks, and radios were dismantled in my childhood days, and failed to put back together? Countless. Most ended up collected as scraps in a box that still sits in a corner in my room in the province, while some got recycled into toy robots that my mother put up in display at home. She told me that one day she will contact the TV network to make a feature on my trash robots. Oh nooooooooo! *pure horror*

Okay, enough robots. Back to the camera.

It's working fine, and although it now makes a sound like that of a dentist's drill when you zoom in and out, the images are just as fine as it’s always been. The FOLI principle did its job, so I'm back to my old camera-totting self (Wheee!).

Dang! This is one tough camera, and looks like it'll last for another thousand pictures. ^__^