Labour in vain

It’s official – I can’t save my beloved black and silver Polaroid SX70 Sonar camera :(

One day last year, on inserting a fresh film pack, the motor just kept running and would not stop, even after ejecting the cardboard dark slide. I’d read that this was a fairly common affliction and was due to a snapped plastic shaft that attaches to the motor. The repair is quite simple and involves opening the camera up and reattaching one of the springs in lieu of the shaft (see here for details).

The first hurdle was actually getting the SX70 open. The base plate is covered by a sheet of aluminium (covered in leatherette) which you must remove to get at the screws underneath – it’s glued on pretty tight and it’s quite easy to wreck the covering getting it off. That’s when I discovered that the screwheads were a non-standard 1mm square:

I looked everywhere online and searched my local Maplins store top to bottom, but couldn’t find a screwdriver to fit. Apparently most SX70s are assembled using star-shaped Torx screws, but my mine was one of the very few held together with non-standard square-head screws. My friend Ben, a sculptor, came to the rescue and filed down an Allen key to make me a bespoke screwdriver small enough to undo the screws!

Aaaaarrgghhh! To heap Pelion on Ossa, the moment I opened the casing I found this:

That was the repair that I was about to make, and someone had got there first! You can see clearly that the end of the screw has been poked into a little slot on the drive shaft coming from the motor. If the problem wasn’t solved by this repair, then it can only mean that something else was wrong (most likely costly gear damage). I had to admit defeat, my beloved SX70 Sonar was kaput…