Canon 300D Modification Complete!!

I took the plunge today and modified my Canon 300D to remove that nasty IR blocking filter. Just finished putting it all back together and it works!!

I took some photos along the way so i'll do a proper write up at some point.

Basically it all went roughly to plan. All except I had an awful job getting the old filter glass out of its frame. So after deciding I was past the point of no return anyway guess what I did?

I took a screwdriver and a hammer to it!! That sorted it out pretty quick!
The bit I was most worried about, cutting the new piece of glass, turned out to be a doddle, nice clean cuts with a rotary glass cutter, in fact the fit was so tight I didnt even need to glue it back in to the frame. Reassembling all of the internal ribbon cables was a bit of a chore, I was worried that I might not have pushed them home far enough. So when I put the battery back in and fired it up I was delighted It all worked ok. ALl my normal images are pink but that will be sorted by a color correcting (filter similar to the original internal one) which should hit my doorstep in a few days.

All in all it was a lot easier than I thought it would be. Scary as hell though ripping open an expensive camera like that.

All I need now is a clear sky to test it under the stars!!!!

Excellent! Well done Dave! I'd love to see the results.

thats good stuff Dave.
I was wondering about removing the orig filter, this is the part that makes me think twice about it.
Where did you source the external filter (for normal daytime stuff) from??

Dave,

The external filter was a big problem. The only place in the world I could find one is here.

www.maxmax.com/aXRay58mmFilters.asp

Its the XNite CC1 filter about half way down the page. Now the problem. Although the filter only costs 76USD the company are charging 65USD shipping plus another 17USD for handling and customs forms. What a shower!! They only ship UPS which is apparantly why the shipping is so high. Then they have the cheek to charge 17dollars for handling. Just to fill out a little green form!

ANyway having scoured the net and not found another solution I had to bite the bullet and order it. The nice thing is I dont need to worry about custom white balance or anything like that for normal daytime photography once I have the filter.

I forgot to mention in my original post, I've checked the autofocus and manual focus and both work perfectly thanks to the 0.1mm spacers I inserted between the CMOS assembly and the camera body!

A bummer on the filter situation, those guys are just screaming out for competition.

As for the camera mod, did you source all the other parts seperately or is there a kit you get, maybe I'm getting too far ahead and all this will be in the instructions.

Dave the only other thing needed is the replacement optical window. I got this from edmund optics. Its a 75mm x 50mm x 3mm piece of optically flat glass covered by protective film on both sides. It needs to be cut to size to fit the filter mount inside the camera. I do have some left over so if you ever decide to do the mod, I'd be happy to cut you a window from it.