A700 both wheels gone crazy

[adakshi]

This is serious problem indeed. First the front wheel started acting on its own and now its completely non-functional. I swapped functions between front and rear wheel but recently rear wheel started to show the same problem.

I am back in India and here I don't have any service center including Sony authorized service centers that can repair A700. Also it is out of US warranty, so no point sending it back. I need at least one wheel working.
Fortunately Wheels in VG is working but in landscape mode its hard to use.

What do I do? I may try buying another A700 from US but that's again risky, it might have some other flaws and I will be out of warranty as soon at it leaves US. I can try buying it locally, but I haven't seen any shop that carries A700, all we have is A200

Ayan

[Greg Beetham]

Didn't I see somewhere there was a fix for that? like blowing compressed air into the wheels to clean the dust out? I might be wrong though.
Greg

[David Kilpatrick]

Your dust and sand conditions are probably the cause. Get a small vacuum cleaner, and rig up a straw or a bit of aquarium piping to the nozzle to create a very powerful local suction. You may need to cut an extra hole to reduce the resistance and avoid overloading the vacuum cleaner. Use the straw on the gap down the sides of the control wheels. This may be enough to solve the problem. Also, try blowing with a jet blower like the Visible Dust or Rocket blower then use the vacuum again.

If that works partially, a very minimal squirt with switch cleaner could complete the job. But don't squirt switch cleaner in there if you have dust present, make sure you blow and vacuum first to remove as much dust as possible.

David

[bakubo]

Unfortunately, this is a pretty common problem with A700 bodies. Some people never have a problem, but many do. I did within the first year and after fairly light use and kept clean. You can read about what Sony did to repair it in this thread (see also the link to my earlier thread about the problem):

http://www.photoclubalpha.com/forum/vie ... =32&t=2610

In my opinion there is a clear design defect or bad parts got put in some A700 bodies. I should note that after Sony replaced a whole bunch of parts to "fix" the problem it started happening again occasionally only a couple of months later. Fortunately it is still a fairly rare occurrence, but that is how it started the first time too. Needless to say, although the A700 is wonderful in other ways I am totally underwhelmed by their quality control and this is after having two defective KM 7D bodies too. I want to like Sony and if they someday come out with a replacement for the A700 I bet I will want one. Whether I actually buy one though is a huge question mark in my mind.

By the way, Sonolta made many useful contributions to my thread but he is gone and all of his posts are gone as well. I think you can still follow it though.

[kingfisher]

i had this problem to
i send it to SONY and after two weeks i had my camera back

the problem was the SWITCH BLOCK
now i have no problems anymore , you can try what Greg say
blow compressed air into the wheels

good luck

greetings
gustav

[adakshi]

Actually I tried everything, rocket blower, vacuum cleaner with nozzle, then a big full size vacuum cleaner, nothing worked... Initially front wheel used to jump 3-4 steps now whichever way I scroll it just shifts back and forth by one unit .. like shifts +.3 , then 0 then again +.3 like that. Now rear wheel started jumping 3-4 steps .. scary.

What I didn't try is contact cleaner, that is not available here and even if I find one, I wouldn't use it on plastic.

Looking at the number of complaints floating around in forums, Sony should have recalled those faulty models.

Ayan

[Winston]

I started having the problem on one of mine a few months ago. I did the vacuum thing to both of them and haven't had the problem since.

[lepidopteran]

I had this trouble in the summer. First the rear wheel kept overshooting in playback mode, then it gradually got worse until touching the wheel made the shutter speeds, apertures, ISO etc overshoot. I kept shooting in Program mode for a while so I didn't have to touch the wheels. Then after checking out a few forums I found the answer. I started by removing the battery. Then I directed a Servisol Aero Duster ( available from Maplins ) onto each wheel, turning them slowly to make sure it cleaned as much as possible out. Then I squirted some contact cleaner ( Servisol Super 10, recommended for cleaning switches ) onto each wheel. Next I spent 5 minutes very rapidly twiddling each wheel back and forth to make sure that the cleaner could seep into every corner and soften up whatever was causing the shorts.

Touch wood, since then the camera has been fine, but I can't afford a recurrence of the problem on a long foreign shoot, so a second body ( a7xxx replacement or a850 ) or system change is on the cards.

Adrian
http://www.learnaboutbutterflies.com