Minimalistic 350D

[12dstring]

Or... what you can take off and still use it for astrophotography.

Following on from my cooling and amp-off adventures, and inspired by this hypermod of the 450D, I thought it was about time my 350D lost some unnecessary weight. After all, it would be sealed up in a box and I never intend to use it for normal photography again.

So I set out pulling bits out and seeing if it still works:

All green-numbered ribbon cables are needed, things attached the red ones can be removed.

1 + 6) CMOS (needed - although will not cause errors if removed, just a black image)

2) Autofocus sensor (removable)

3) Hotshoe and flash sensor (needed - will give err 99 after image taken)

4) Flash, DOF and flash button (removable)

5 + 8) Viewfinder sensor and LEDs (removable)

7) On/off, mode wheel, shutter button..etc (needed)

9) Power board (needed)

10 + 11) LCD and rear buttons (removable)

After these are disconnected the main parts that can be removed are:

-Flash circuit (make sure you know what you're doing around the flash capacitor, discharge it before going near it or the flash bulb)

-Autofocus sensor

-Viewfinder assembly

-Front housing, rear housing and LCD, top housing.

Afterwards:

You can solder on a SPDT switch (or in fact SPST as it turns out) as the on/off switch, and then a jumper wire between two contacts to keep it in M mode:

Without the viewfinder and autofocus sensor the mirror is useless, and bouncing up and down only causes extra vibrations, so I took it out.

I also dismantled the shutter gearing to remove the springs in the mirror lever arm, which will help with vibrations too (leave in the shutter itself!).

I'm thinking of adding a modded webcam and small prism where the viewfinder/autofocus sensor were, as an OAG. There's plenty of space there now.

Some of the lost weight:

It was 468g without the battery and card, and is now 246g. So this will help offset some of the weight gain from the new housing and cooling parts.

The metal frame is fairly heavy, and there's parts of that that are no longer structurally relevant, so I may take them off.

[rowan46]

Does this invalidate the warranty?

[12dstring]

Do you think they'd notice?

[Gina]

That's very interesting - thank you for posting The layout is quite different from the 1100D that I've butchered but I was interested particularly that you succeeded in replacing the mode switch parts with a wire link. My reboxed camera retains that part of the top housing. I'm not worried about bringing out the on/off switch - I just remove my external power to reset the camera when required. I have that hard wired to the power board.