Monday, March 8, 2010

Magnetized gorillapod

So my brother asked me if I could cross a camera magmount with my gorillapod, and I've been considering how to do that.

The tricky part is replacing a gorillapod foot with a magnet. My current though is to take the existing foot off the link chain, put the head of a bolt in the recess left behind, and secure the bolt by filling the recess with some sort of ceramic or plaster. Then I'd screw on one of these.

The only thing I really don't like about it is that, compared to my existing magmount, which uses one of these rubber feet, the magnetized gorillapod is going to be hell on surfaces I attach it to; K&J doesn't make the rubber feet for the right size of magnet, and I definitely don't need the 75lb of surface force provided by their 32mm mounting magnets, which is the smallest size they offer the rubber feet for. (I use one of those 32mm magnets as the basis to my existing magmount, and that's more than enough to keep my camera affixed to the top of my car while driving down the freeway. (By the way; the reactions you get from people when you start drivingdown the road with what looks like a DSLR on top of your camera can be hilarious; the magmount is low profile enough to not be obvious. I should paint the camera orange/black or something so people get the idea that it's supposed to be there.) So I've got two things to resolve before I build it. First, how to make plaster (or some better material equally as cheap to get/make/use.) Second, How to put a protective coating on the magnets so they don't scratch painted surfaces.

1 comment: