Camera Stand
Taking pictures while tearing apart an engine is not easy if you are trying to keep the camera clean. Even though it was only a baby engine from a lawnmower, it was still very dirty. Steps needed to be taken so that I could keep my gloves on and still take photos.
Step one was to have the camera take a picture without touching the camera. That was an easy one, ~$9 on Amazon for maybe $2 worth of IR transmitter and the camera magically took pictures without being touched (that is a very generous $2 at that).
Step two was supposed to be place the camera on the tripod and be done. As you can guess based on the title, that didn’t work out. Step two instead became go into the backyard and grab a heavy object that could be welded to.
As most people would, I went into my backyard and got an old brake rotor out of the 55 gallon drum that holds old brake rotors. The chosen rotor was donated from a 2007 Ford F-150.
With the brake rotor base in hand I needed some height so the camera could get a good view of what I was doing. A piece of steel rebar was mated to the rotor for that. It was just resting on the rotor in the picture above, the C clamp at the top was keeping it from falling over. The two pieces of steel to the right of the rotor were from the blue scrap steel bucket (also in the photo). I started by welding the rebar to the rotor. Normally welding to cast iron requires more care than welding steel to steel, but this only had to support a small camera and I wasn’t worried about cracking in the rotor. It was also a rather thick piece of cast iron. I then inexpertly welded the two pieces of scrap steel as supports for the rebar.
The final piece of the puzzle was an arm to mount the camera on. As it were, I already had an arm that would do just the thing.
The arm was made to attach a camera to the headrest in a car. It is much nicer than the plastic version I attempted to use with my GoPro. The final result can be seen below. Now I can take pictures using the remote and the camera stays clean.
Although this setup does work, it only works for still photos. While using it I kept bumping into the rebar. The rebar and camera would vibrate for quite a while after each bump. The still photos don’t show the motion, but if it were taking video it would make for rather terrible quality. If I decide to use it for video in the future I will swap the rebar out for some square tubing.
