PVC Steadicam - November 3rd, 2009
I’ve been attempting to make the PVC Steadicam featured on this site. It looks pretty hacked up, but the results look pretty impressive, and it seems like a relatively easy build.
I’ve been out and got most of the tools and materials that i need and after about 30 minutes i had got surprisingly further than i thought i would. The gimbal is in place and the threaded bar and wooden weight is attached. The gimbal seems to work pretty well so far although i couldn’t seem to get the same thickness of PVC in the example. I think this is going to be my major problem. For now though it seems to be holding together ok.
The inner PVC coupling that hugs the skate bearing isn’t as tightly huggy as i would like and i think i’m going to have to come up with a better way to attach these two pieces together, as this join is where most of the weight is going to be concentrated. I’m thinking bigger nuts that cover both the PVC and the bearing to hold them i place.
The hardest part of this job is going to be building a mount onto the top of the threaded rod to attach the camera to. The example site doesn’t have instructions on how he built his. I’m thinking affixing some sort of tripod head to a piece of wood is going to be the go. I’ll keep this post updated with results as i go.
*************update wed 4th*************
Just got a bunch of washers to use as weights for the slat of wood at the base. I’ve picked up about 38 of them, which worked out at about $15 including the bolts. This has been the most expensive part of the whole thing so far. All the PVC only cost me about $8.
I’m not sure they’re actually going to be heavy enough, but we’ll see. I’m assuming they will need to be *about* the same weight as the camera, and they’re definitely not that, but then again they’re at the *long* end of the rod, so maybe that makes they’re weight proportionally more than the shorter, top end. This is what the dude used in the reference site by the looks of it too – fender (mudguard) washers.