Articulated Camera Arm on Wheels (no more Tripod!) (Plans available)

hey welcome back everybody let me show you why I hate tripods so after almost destroying a camera and putting up with these things for way too long I decided to finally come up with the solution and my solution is this actually that's a desk lamp but you'll see where I'm going with this because I used the same principle to make this camera arm which has a bunch of advantages over a tripod most importantly it's almost impossible to chip this thing over but I can only show you a few seconds of that because I need you to watch the rest of the video so let's get into it the first step was to make a heavy rolling base with a very low center of gravity to make this whole setup stable and secure against tipping [Applause] you're going to see later that this first version of the bass turned out to be a bit of a failure but for the sake of continuity and entertainment I'm going to show you some of the design mistakes I made with this project and how I fix them [Applause] I guess this thing is technically still a sort of tripods because it has three legs but that does have the advantage that each leg always has contact with the ground compared to using floor legs this stud here will be welded to the base and then the long tube can just slide onto it it doesn't really need to be a solid chunk of steel but it was easy to make and I guess I just like wasting material if the tube was steel it could just be welded to the base directly but I often prefer to build things in a way that allows me to take them apart or change something instead of just welding everything together and you will see later in this video why that can be a big advantage next I needed to add some weight to the base and I decided to just cut out some circles from these old steel plates and yes I'm using a cooking pot as a cutting jig like I said I'm going to have to revisit this thing later and fix some things and some of you can probably guess why but for now it's done now that the base was sort of done I started to make the large clamping block that clamps onto the pole and holds the arm jokes aside I actually try to avoid wasting material I could have used the drill to create this load show but using a hole saw allows me to keep the core from this block to use it for something else by the way you don't really need a milling machine or a lathe for all of this it's just that having these machines seems to come with the tendency to over engineer things speaking of over engineering I once again made plans for this project and they also include information on how to build all of this without using fancy machines for example you can make a similar clamping block using some square tubing which only requires an angle grinder and a power drill if you want to get the plans just check the description or click the link up here if any machinists are watching this right now you might be thinking I'm an idiot for mounting a check into another Chuck but I still don't have a backplate for the four job and if it's stupid and works it's not stupid as you can see the each exception setup ended up not killing me and did actually produce a pretty nice fit so you can't argue with the results [Applause] it's not finished yet but the clamping works very nice [Applause] the small-block I'm making now fits into the large block I just made and mix up the joint which allows to swivel the arm left and right without having to unclaimed the large block there's a budget from shining ahead which is pretty self-explanatory so I'm going to shut up for a minute [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] now it's time to make the parallel arm itself which is not as complicated as it looks it's basically just six plates and four tubes I like to make things out for myself so instead of just buying some flat bar and cutting out all these little rectangles from plates and then I started milling down all the sides to get them to the same size and clean up the edges the outside shape of these plates is actually not really important for their function so everything except for the drilling here is pretty much just to make it look nice I wasn't sure how to attach the springs that will keep this thing up so that's why I'm drilling all these holes it's just to have some options later to figure out the best spring position these little tubes I'm making here are going to be the axles that connect all the moving parts and you might be wondering why not just use a bolt instead and I'll explain why in a second so these things are a pretty tight fit and that's why I made them I actually did use bolts instead of these on my first try of assembling the arm and I ended up having way too much play in the joints there's a few reasons for that one is that the tubing I used at first was too thin which comes with the tendency to produce oversized holes when you drill it another reason is that even if I was able to drill an 8 millimeter hole an m8 bolt isn't actually 8 millimeters on the outside it's actually a bit smaller and so those errors just added up and made everything a bit too loose for my taste and by making these hollow axles myself I was able to make them fit exactly to whatever size hole I would end up drilling and it's also much better for the joints to rotate on a flat surface rather then on the threads of the bolt this is the last piece for the arm just a simple base to mount a camera head to [Applause] now it's finally time to put this whole thing together one thing that's very important are these plastic washers I'm putting in you I'm it is from above Teflon on the lathe but you can also just buy these at the hardware store they're necessary to provide some spacing between the plates and the tubes because otherwise you just get aluminum pieces rubbing against each other which creates too much friction and it also wears down the parts so that's what you want a washer in between that is made from something softer than aluminum and as you can see these axles mhm worked pretty nice because there's almost no play now and these joints [Applause] I'm also putting spring washers on these bolts because they allow you to set the tension on these joints by adjusting the nuts and that will you control the amount of friction in the joint which is also quite important for this thing to function correctly because you don't want too much friction but you also don't want the joints to be completely free moving it's time to install the springs now I didn't know what to buy so I just bought a bunch of different ones to sort of try what works best figuring out how much tension was needed for each joint was just a matter of trying all kinds of different setups so this took quite a while I mean like I said the friction in the joints also plays an important role so you want to find the sweet spot for both the tension and the friction and that also depends on the weight of whatever camera setup is mounted at the end if you can find a good balance it's possible to have this arm stay in place in almost any position just by itself without needing to be locked down now that the arm was finished I realized my mistake I made with the base that I mentioned in the beginning turns out I weigh underestimated the amount of leverage that the weight of the camera would create so the base I made was both too small and also too light so with the arm extended it would just tip over another problem was that the pole itself was shaking too much because it was only attached at one point all the way at the bottom so I had to come up with a way to support it further up and make it more stable luckily I didn't have to make an entirely new base I figured I could just use bigger weight plates and also give it a wider stance by extending the legs so I ended up cutting another set of these steel circles and since I couldn't find a cooking pot that large I used this simple circle cutting jig which turned out to work better anyway and yes I know I shouldn't be plasma cutting on a wooden pallet that was stupid but it work and this is where it came in handy that I designed this thing so it could be taken apart if I had just welded the white plates at the pole onto this in the beginning I would have had to either cut everything apart or just start over completely but this way I was able to just bolt on these extensions and the large plates and they turned out to fix the problem [Applause] [Applause] in order to support the poll I decided to over complicate things once more for no particular reason the simple solution would be to just screw a well on some diagonal tubing to support the poll but instead I'm making a steel ring that clamps onto the long tube and connects to some steel cables that will then be put under tension to hold everything nice and tight I still add some steel cable but no way to attach it so I just weld some stainless washers to the ends I'm pretty sure this connection is much weaker than the cable itself so this would probably be a really dumb idea of the cables were holding anything important but to keep a pole from wobbling I figured this is strong enough so one end connects to each leg and the other one to the ring and in between there is a cable tensioner that can be used for you guessed it cable tensioning I wasn't actually sure if this would work before I made it and I'm super impressed with the result I didn't even put that much tension on the cables and the difference was night and day the shaking is completely gone except for some small vibrations and I think it's a much more elegant solution compared to welding a bunch of clunky tubing onto it [Music] [Music] now it's finally done and I'm pretty happy with the result it makes filming in the shop in general much more convenient because there's no tripod that gets in the way and interferes with your work the range of motion on this is so big that you can cover a huge amount of possible shots without even moving the base or adjusting the height it allows me to get perspectives that are possible with a tripod like overhead shots and filming around obstacles [Music] it also reduces the risk of the camera getting damaged so hopefully in future videos you can expect some improved videography thank you for watching and if you want to help me make more videos you can support me on patreon or just buy some plants and if you want to see what's coming up next you can also check out my Instagram account see you next time you

Channel: Phil Vandelay

Views: 101,066

Rating: 4.959105 out of 5

Keywords: Camera, Filming, Shooting, Video, Metalwork, Tripod, Camera Tripod, Boom Arm, Camera Arm, Gimbal, Video Production, Workshop, Welding, Machining, Aluminium, Maker, Making, DIY, Building, Tutorial, Plans, Blueprints, Aluminum, Steel, Actuated Arm, Parallel Arm, Flexible Arm, Extendable Arm, Camera Boom

Id: sRkdNH5fxRE

Length: 21min 35sec (1295 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 12 2020