We’re used to seeing hacked camera mounts but [CroBuilder] mentioned to us that nobody is really making plain old tripods themselves. He loves to work in his shop so he spent about ten hours building this tripod for himself.
We’d say it’s built to last, but that comes at the cost of weighing a lot. He used square tubing for the legs, which are tripled up in order to allow them to telescope. Each leg has two pipes mounted to the central hub that he fabricated out of hexagonal pipe. A bolt and wing nut acts as hinge and clamp. On the bottom section of the leg there’s a tab spanning the two pieces and another clamping mechanism to hold the adjustable bottom portion of the leg in position.
He finished up the project with black paint on many of the pieces, with the legs themselves polished until shiny. Will rust be a problem if he doesn’t use a clear coat?
The nice thing about a quality tripod is that you can use them for more than just cameras. For instance, add some components to make your own laser level.
rust will eventually become a problem, yes. It’s when, not if. There are a variety of options though, including clear coating it, or tool preservation coatings such as Kano Labs (www.kanolabs.com) Prevox or Weatherpruf. A little care will make for a long and happy life.
Could just use stainless, material price will be approx.double, but it needs no coating
alu is probably around the same price.
With two clamps on each leg they could be double instead of tripple.
You can get easily get sizes that fit into each other so you could do real telescope
What you can easily get in for instance the US might not be so easy in croatia where this thing was made it seems.
It is interesting that wood is better at dampening vibrations. Even better than carbon fiber.
Aluminum is so-so.
Yeah aluminum would be a better choice. Wood might be even better.
Moitherfucker, I was just contemplating building a tripod today!
I like the industrial look of this “actual” tripod. Nice job!
@fonz Yeah, stainless would look quite sweet as well!
No one makes plain tripods? Try Gitzo.
Wow, color me impressed.
This looks about 10x more solid than my commercially made camera tripod.
Reminds me of Matthias Wandel’s wooden tripods: http://woodgears.ca/tripod/
Nobody’s building tripods? I built one a couple of weeks ago:
http://wiki.milwaukeemakerspace.org/projects/tripod
looks nice (keyword “looks”) what is the weight of that bad boy?
domehow i preffer to lug around my carbonfiber manfrotto….
Why would one build a tripod? The obvious – Because they can, because they want to, because they are bored.
Seriously though. There are cheaper and lighter tripods out there. I’m not entirely knocking it though. It’s a really cool build. Seems very strong!