MattC867

Good to know. I ended up deciding to put the camera back together without the springs. I just screwed the sensor assembly tight against the body. I'll keep the screws around in case I need to make any adjustments. Have you had any issues?

So I finally got around to making my first attempt at the sensor modification. It's great to have 92 pages of R&D to go on! Just wanted to add some more bits on this chain to give back a little bit. My first attempt was not a 100% success, but the sensor still works. I've ordered two more sensors (just $100 for the pair) and feel much more confident now. I plan to use the current sensor as a tester for any new ideas. Cover glass and CFA removal for the 550D definitely seem to fall on the harder end of the difficulty spectrum. Cover glass was on tight, but in the end defeated by a butane torch and a razor blade. For CFA removal I first tried the scraping method using a wooden tool but did not have a lot of success here. For the sensor on this model, the CFA did not break away as it seems it does on some other models and I felt like I was doing more harm than good. See Image 1 for a representative flat taken after about 30 min of scraping. You can see from that image that this also resulted in 2 dead rows of pixels. Once I saw this I gave up any hope that I could limit this endeavor to just one sensor and became much more carefree about the whole process. So, I got out the dremel tool.... Using some glass polish and the felt polishing bit, I polished the CFA away using the dremel tool. I also experimented with some glue to protect the gold wires. I used Loctite Go2 glue and it seems to have worked fine. I had been worried about the glue breaking the wires as it cured, but seems it's OK. The other two images are a flat and dark frame after dremel polishing and glue application. You can see I over polished in a few spots, and there's a hot pixel and row, but I'm confident I can mitigate those issues on a second attempt. It could be better, but I'm hoping the lessons learned from the 'Mark-1' will translate into better results on the next go-around. I plan to try some dry polishing using the dremel to clean up the edges. If successful I may go without the glass polish on the next attempt. Thanks again guys!

After some more forum scouring it appears that the 550D and one other model are the only Canon DSLRs which use this setup (springs instead of shims) for mounting the sensor. Oh well, I'm just going to set them back as close to the original configuration as possible. I guess worst case is that I'll have to spend an extra night going back and forth between the workbench and telescope to get it perfect.

Thanks Gina, at least on this 550D (t2i) there do not appear to be shims - or maybe I'm just thick. I just see the sensor is mounted on three spring loaded mounting pins. I'll give it a go anyway, thanks!

This is a great thread! I'm in the process of doing this myself and have one question for you guys who have removed the sensor before. When removing and reinstalling the sensor board from the main body, is there a more effective method for ensuring that the sensor is installed perfectly perpendicular to the optical axis? I'm counting the number of turns from the screws when I take it out and measuring the length of the pegs, but I'm not sure this is the most accurate method. I feel like even a slight misalignment will cause optical defects in the final image.