Rear camera lens and bezel - I can't find guide on replacement

Hi Marianne,

First off, if you could post a picture of what you're seeing, that would help a lot.

It's not unusual for the lenses on the camera covers to get broken, but I don't actually recall seeing a case where the bezel came off as well. Normally the bezels are a huge pain in the behind for people who are replacing the rear glass, as they overlap the glass so you either have to pry them off or resort to breaking the glass out from under the bezel.

The thing is, those bezels aren't just glued to the frame of the phone; they're actually spot welded in place. So if your glass is intact, I'm puzzling over how that darn thing came off in the first place. It almost sounds like the bezel broke off around the welds and left a bottom ring of metal inside the case. If that's what happened, you'll have to get that metal out before the replacement bezel will fit in there. The only safe way to do that is to open up the phone and remove the rear cameras then do something like grind it out with a Dremel tool.

Anyway, if you can post some pictures of what you're seeing, maybe we can figure out what's going on with your phone. The higher the resolution the better so we can zoom in on that camera opening.

UPDATE:

Okay, good picture, Marianne! Now that we can see what we're dealing with, I don't think there's anything left in there. If we look at the other side of that spot on the inside of the frame, we see that those same four cutouts around the edge of the hole are actually on the frame itself and not something that got left behind. Here's a picture from the rear camera replacement guide.

As far as resecuring the new bezel to the frame, the original was spot welded in place; in that picture you can actually see the little tiny individual spot welds around the circumference of the opening. Since that's not really an option, my suggestion would be an epoxy; there's one that's popular for auto repair called JB Weld that should work well for gluing the bezel back on - you can buy it at any auto parts store and probably a lot of department stores as well.

Now the part we still have to figure out is why your replacement bezel isn't fitting where it's supposed to. Did you get the part from iFixit or somewhere else?