Hey guys,
I recently bought a Maxxum 7D D-SLR off e-bay that would shut off after you try to take a picture. I repaired it OK, so thought I'd give a few hints if anyone wants to try repairs themselves...
First off, some background:
The camera is NOT easy to repair, it is considerably more difficult than simple digital cameras. Which you should have experience ipping entirely apart and putting back together some cheap digital cameras first! A lot of the way cables are connected is similar.
The flash capacitor in these will retain a dangerous charge long after the camera has been turned off and the battery removed. It's typically charged to a few hundred volts. THIS COULD KILL YOU IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING, AND
WILL
HURT LIKE HELL. YOU
WILL
DROP/THROW THE CAMERA AS A MUSCLE REFLEX. I OR THIS FORUM IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE TO YOUR CAMERA OR LIFE, DO AT OWN RISK.
You will need to be comfortable soldering. Many of the wires on this thing do not have connectors for some reason, and instead are soldered right to a flexible PCB. Always take lots of pictures when taking apart the camera!
The outer case uses tons of different types of screws. Some are just different by a mm or two, some are the same length but different thread spacing. Take a piece of masking tape by each hole and label the screw type, then put that screw in a small zip-loc bag. By the time I was done ripping it apart I had about 21 different screw types in the camera (that's different types, not just number).
There's a service manual somewhere for this, which would make this a lot easier. I didn't have that though alas, so will post some photos for other people who might not have it.
For my camera the shutter would not open. You can test that by disabling the shutter-lock in the menu, and the camera won't bug you to attach a lens.
To get to the shutter you have to remove the CCD. You will have to unsolder the shutter to remove it. I just had to play around with it a bit - I'm not sure exactly what I did! I suspect the camera was dropped and it got jammed. It might be related to the issue other people have, i'm not sure. There's a page at

; that has a picture that is handy when putting the shutter back together.
When the Maxxum 7D goes to take a picture, it moves the lens up. At the same time this "preps" the shutter. You will have to figure out how this two-sided gear piece fits in based on that, my crappy camera wasn't good enough to take a picture of how it fit.



The rest of the images are at:
http://www.newae.com/images/maxxum7d
(Don't want to post them all!)