Hey,

Anyone who has had a go at making your own camera gimbals feel free to show em off here.

Myself, and prolly quite a few others, are looking for inspiration.

Thanks!

Ben

Started out a long time ago with alu brackets but found them a pain to make accurately and found that model building plywood is more than strong enough and weighs less.

All the cam mounts in the pics are made from a mix of 2 and 3mm model building ply with simple but joints and some CA. Work fine. The free hanging gimbal is a slice of 1cm of 25 or 30mm alu tube with four holes and four little ball connectors. Looks nice but doesn't work very well in a multikopter as the free hanging nature allows swaying.

Same mount, but now with direct drive of the tilt axis instead of control rods, was later modified to have a sponge dampened roll axis and a servo controled tilled. Worked quite well.

Latest iteration of the same mount uses a plywood book shelve carrier cut to measure as the bracket against which the roll servo, mounted in the top of the camera carrier, pushes, while tilt servo remained unchanged. This latest iteration is roll and tilt stabilized. Vibration in the roll axis is now damped while retaining low friction with a 3cm circular piece of felt on the back of the cam carrier against a 3cm diameter ply plate on the bracket (not yet installed in the last pics). Also I-ve since stiffened the mount for use in this config by adding a 2mm ply plate on the inside of the top, reducing the little bit of torsion the original allowed.

With the parts drawn up in CAD you can simply print them 1:1, tack glue them onto the ply with a glue stick, scroll saw the parts, remove the paper with e.g. some alcohol, and glue together. Takes less than an evening from start to finish to make one (or even several) of these mounts.

Thats very interesting, well done!

I hadn't considered using plywood, but I will look into it now!

Heres a pic of my home made mount, still in service today lol.

Ignore the heli on it