How to repair Compact Flash broken pin

"here is a disassembling guide - but their focus is the sensor mod - so you won't have to go all the way.

the cf slot problem is bad - some were lucky and could use adapters for different memory cards - like here"

it's quite easy. Take a needle and cut of the last 4 mm including the head. Put it in the compact flash card in the hole where the missing pin fits. And.. it's working.

One CF pins was bent down inside the camera. I tried filling the corresponding hole with copper wire stripped from an old, unrelated recharger cord, but that didn't work. So I took an eyeglass screwdriver and was able to flick/bend the CF pin back up and, voila, it worked. That said I'm never buying anything with CF again...

My 5 year old Canon Rebel XT had 3 missing pins (not sure how they were broken off) in the CF card port. Instead of needles, which were a bit too large to fit into the CF slots, my Hubby used 2 small copper wire pieces entwined to make one wire equal to the size of the pins' diameter. He filled the 3 corresponding holes in the CF card with the wire... he left a tiny bit of it sticking out, but snipped off the rest. The CF card works perfectly now! YAY!

I had part of a pin from my Rebel XTI break off and get lodged in my CF card while at the Grand Canyon. Does anyone know how to get it out, someone who could get it out, or where to send it to get this done? I am clueless on where to start and don't want to tear open the card and ruin the 400+ photos on the card. Any help is appreciated.

I would simply have gone to a Jewellery supply shop and bought a cheap pair of needle nose Jewellers tweezers, these have hard steel jaws which are only 1/64 wide at the points. Push them into the slot, get a grip on the broken pin and pull it out. The socket is a different matter again, the pins usually break because someone forces a card into the slot the wrong way round. if you can dismantle the socket out of the camera, you find that the pins are made of Gold plated Hard bronze, if they get bent, they usually drastically weaken because the next time a card is inserted, it will bend the pin flat. People tend to straighten them again using a small screwdriver and that leaves them fractured and ready to break. The next card insert snaps them off. However, the saving grace is that the pin protrudes out of the back of the white plastic insulator block by about 3 mm. Do not touch it's soldered connection, but bend the wire so that the solder moves to the immediate back of the insulator. That leaves you with a new pin which is about 3 mm long and will work with any card. Fix it at the back with a drop of epoxy glue and reassemble. This will take a couple of hours but if you are handy with your hands, you will be able to do it easily