Wear on CF card receptacles

My camera is a rather old DSLR which still uses CF cards. In order to get the images, I would take it out of the camera body, put it into a card reader and then transfer the images. Afterwards the card was inserted back into the camera body. This has worked fine for years, but one day the card reader would not work any more. I didn't understand, and just bought a new card reader. One day in 2016, the new card reader stopped working. I then looked into the card reader and saw that a pin was bent.

So I took a simple screwdriver and tried to fix the pin and bend it back.

With a little bit of work I managed to get the pin somewhat straight. The next time that I would insert the card, the pins would hopefully straighten out.

But the card also didn't work in the camera any more. Looking into the camera CF card slot, I realized that perhaps the camera was doomed. The same pin was broken there. And this is not a 10 EUR replacement part, it would mean a completely new camera body.

Fortunately it was still rather straightforward to fix and I got the pin sorted out at the time.

For some reason I hadn't looked at the CF card itself all the time. And there was plastic breaking right where the separator between the pins should have been. This of course explains why this card has broken three card receptors.

I then bought a new CF card and hoped that it would be okay. But then a few weeks ago, the issue came up again with my next card reader. While inserting the card, I had a really strange feeling. It was too late and a few pins were already broken.

Although I am really glad that CF cards are extinct now, it doesn't really help with my camera. For the time being I just use the micro USB cable to extract the images, although it is much slower than with a card reader.

In the end one can only be super careful with the CF cards and try to minimize the wear and tear on them.