Fix the flash on the Nikon D70 DSLR

This morning I fixed my girlfriends pop-up flash on her Nikon D70 camera.  I decided to document the ordeal hopefully to help others with this problem (seems to be a poor design on Nikon's part).  First of all; shout-out to Steve and Tony for posting on how to fix this problem.  The primary reason for this blog post is to give more in-depth info on what is going on and provide an alternate solution to fix the problem.

The Problem(s):
The flash does not pop up or go off when the shutter button is pressed.

The Solution:
First, you should go to Steve's blog post to see how to take the camera apart. His post is great and very well may fix your problem.

These are made up component names...

The parts we will be looking at to fix the flash are the plastic rod, the metal hook for the contact switch and the contact switch.

In this picture the contact switch is NOT making contact with the metal hook.  If it was, the flash would go off.  The plastic rod is SUPPOSED to go underneath the metal hook.  When the flash pops up, it pulls the hook to make contact with the switch, thereby allowing the flash to go off.  In Steve's fix, he suggests that you make a hook out of a paper clip and pull the plastic piece out.   I tried doing this and failed.  In the meantime however, I bent (on accident) the contact switch so that it was ALWAYS in contact with the hook.  This made the flash go off, but is a bad idea as it also makes it so the the latch to allow the flash to pop up is never deployed and therefore the flash never pops up (also; when this was the case, smoke came off from a component.  Bad.)  So yeah....   DO NOT manually connect the hook with the contact switch. Even though this will cause the flash to go off, ultimately it will not work and will probably create more damage to your camera. 

I figured at this point that taking the plastic rod out was a bad idea because if it went in before, it would probably happen again (and I could not pull it out anyway).

What I did instead was super glued a toothpick in where the rod should have been.

Toothpick inserted just below hook

Now that the toothpick is under the hook, when the flash is up, the hook completes the circuit with the contact and the flash works!  I suggest using a small toothpick.  This will glue better (super glue works fine) and will be easier to cut off.

Flash down.  No contact.

This is a picture with the flash down.  You will notice that the toothpick (I just cut it off with scissors) is not making contact with the hook and the hook is not making contact with the switch.  Flash down, flash will not go off.

Flash up.  Contact.

This is a picture with the flash up.  Now the toothpick is making contact with the hook which in turn is now connected to the metal contact.  Flash up. Flash works.


That is it!  Now just put your camera back together and hope you did a good job gluing!