Pin in CF-Card slot bent – any way to fix that myself?

Question

I have an EOS 350D which is like 10 years old by now. Ever since I have used the very same CF Flash card because 1 GB was enough most of the time.

At some point a CF card reader had a bent pin in it, I just bought a new one without thinking about it. Then I had some issues with the new card reader, did not think too hard about it.

Today I tried to insert the CF card into the camera, the camera would not recognize the hard. This happened before, so I just pushed it in again with a bit more force. Then I had an Err 99 and it did not work. So I took out the CF card and to my horror saw this:

All the sudden I understood that it was not the card reader, it was the card itself! With shivers I looked into the card slot of the camera and saw certain doom:

This is what the new cardreader looks like now:

So because I have used the same card over and over and not checked the card once, I have now bent a pin deep inside my camera. It must be rectified such that I can use another card with the camera.

The only way I can think of “fixing” it would be taking a screwdriver and try to bend it back. But I am certain that I do not have the dexterity to apply the force exactly where needed. Also the bent pin will probably sit a bit below the upright pin next to it, I don't really have a chance to fix that bent pin without bending more pins.

So what can I do about it? I fear that sending it to Canon to replace the card reader will be more expensive than a used camera of the same kind :-/.

Answer 1

As suggested by @null, I took the courage to attempt a fix myself. First I practiced on the card reader, that is cheaper to replace. I used a simple flat screwdriver with a sleek “neck”:

The pin which is bent is actually a bit longer than the other pins. Therefore it is possible to separate it from the pin it is leaning on.

Inserting the screw driver with the tip pointing like “|” I managed to separate the pins. I have no way of straighten it, but I managed to move it to the middle a bit. The card reader now looks like this:

From there I did the same thing with the camera. There it now looks like this:

I don't want to push my luck. So I just took the next biggest card that I have (which is 512 MB) and put it into the camera. This works, I should be able to get the pictures via the USB connector. Perhaps I upgrade the card to a larger one but I won't insert the card more often than needed. The 1 GB card will be retired as it has broken three card receptacles by now and 1 GB is not worth much anyway by today's prices.

All the pictures in the question and this answer are taken with my smartphone. I just used a flashlight and the aperture setting to make it decent enough to see something.

Answer 2

Two words - Dental Tools - cheap on amazon - Perfect for this and other jobs like it. Use them more than my regular set of laptop tools. Also potentially good tools to have in case of emergency - probing and extracting objects is what they are made for. My wife stole mine. Buying more.

Answer 3

When inserting a CF card always "wiggle it home" rather than just pushing it in, so that any mildly misaligned pins tend to self align.

For bonus points, get the feel of what a card "should" feel like so you have more chance of stopping for 'fatal' misalignment.

I found that a ballpoint pen made a surprisingly good pin unbending tool. Genuine BIC style was as good as any. The CF pin goes up the central hole and can be "persuaded to straighten". Once it is closer to straight a pair of "needle nose " pliers helps to improve straightness.

While I know that the pen sounds unlikely to be a very good tool I have had multiple successes over many years. Not something I've done for quite a while as I now have only 1 remaining CF card camera* (Nikon D700), with which I am very careful with the card handling. (* Until last week anyway when I bought an older Sony which is also CF).

---

Data point (maybe): I found CF cards relatively rugged mechanically.
I have had far more problems mechanically with SD cards. I found that the somewhat cheaper brands appear to have mechanically more delicate 'housings' and are more likely to have small parts broken off an edge. Even a small missing segment may cause the card to not be insertable in the camera even though visually it's not intuitively obvious that this is the case. Cheaper cards also seem more likely to lose the write protect slide, rendering them non functional until it is replaced or the "unlock" area blocked so that the reader and camera sensors see the card as writable.