Q:

Replacing a Lens Mount

Before the whole 'It's been answered before!' comments roll in I want to say I'm not talking about the mount on the lens I'm talking about the mount on the BODY of the camera. I've been searching everywhere and pretty much everyone has either broken the lens piece or had their body mount so severally damaged they just bought another camera. I'm in a different story. 
My D7000 has the metal ring slightly bent so that the lens no longer comes in full contact with
the autofocus screw on the bottom left. Is there a way to purchase a new ring and spacer (please let me know), and could I then replace it. (Out of warranty here)
Cheers

A:

Even if you could you probably wouldn't want to.
The tolerance for the mount flange and the the sensor being out of alignment before you start having fairly significant problems with uniform focus across the frame is measured in micrometers. If your camera was subjected to enough force to bend the metal ring, then the engineering grade plastic to which the metal flange ring is attached that all light boxes are made out of nowadays, even for such cameras as the Nikon D4 or the Canon 1D X, was also likely to have been warped. Unless you want every photo to demonstrate a tilt effect where the plane of focus is not parallel to the image plane, you most likely do not have the proper equipment, much less the skill, to fix this yourself. A Nikon Service center might could replace the flange and align it correctly, but I've seen cameras that had no visible damage or mechanical alignment issues discernible to the naked eye that had been tweaked too far out of whack to be repairable by a factory service center.

