DIY Steadi-Cams
These were made using the Poor Man’s Steadycam tutorial created by Johnny Chung Lee. His design kicks ass in simplicity and functionality. A great solution for someone who cant afford a real Steadicam.
The tubes are all 1/2″ pipe purchased at home depot. The small one is for my HV30 mounted alone, and the large setup is for my heavier 35mm DOF adapter rig. There is a 2.5 pound weight at the bottom of the small steadycam, and a 5 pound weight at the bottom of the large one. I made some modifications to the tubing lengths used as follows… Small Steadycam: 10″ top and bottom tubes, and an 8″ side tube. Large Steadycam: 18″ bottom tube, and 10″ top and side tubes with a flange fitting and wooden mount for my inverted DOF adapter rig on top. Finally, I wrapped them both up in black hockey stick tap so I’d have a good gripping surface and so they looked cooler.
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DIY Inverted Mount for HV30 and DOF Adapter
After finishing my DOF Adapter project, I couldn’t even use the thing because I had nothing to mount it on. So, naturally I had to build a mount. It was cheaper than buying the shrigg rig I wanted, but not if you factor in all the time spent designing and constructing it! I enjoy building things that work though, and this thing works and provides solid support for my35mm DOF adapter. Its built with solid oak, a bunch of screws and threaded inserts, and carpenter’s glue. The mattebox is poplar. It is finished with minwax ebony stain followed by their vintage oil finish. If you have any questions about building your own, email me.
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Wiring for 35mm DOF Adapter
Well, this was the part of the 35mm DOF adapter project that I was truly dreading – small delicate wiring stuff…but, I figured that if all those other schmucks could do it, it wouldn’t be impossible. It ended up working out! I followed Daniel Schweinert’s DOF adapter wiring diagram to get it all done (see last image).
Some notes: I used a telephone cable like a lot of people do, but it was a little confusing. Telephone wires have in them not two, but four wires. Crap…. For this project you really only need two wires to bring electricity from the battery box to the DOF adapter…so what to do? I just used put the four wires into 2 pairs and treated two wires together as one. This made soldering things together a bit easier. The light wires are really easy to damage, so the final step to make the wiring more bulletproof is to go nuts with a hot glue gun…neatly though. I added hot glue to both the DOF adapter and battery box side of the connections. This serves to make it so the wiring job cannot be disturbed and it also secures the phone line to the point that I can pick up the DOF adapter or batterybox by the line without pulling any wiring out.
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