Tripod Head Drawings

As a machinist I tend to make alot of my own equipment, and have been thinkin about making a nice tripod head, has anyone have any good drawings or blueprints that I can work off of?

Very unlikely if someone took the time to design something, they will just hand over detailed drawings to anyone who asks. I am also a machinist, if I wanted to make one, I would just take one apart, measure it, draw it, then make it. I personally leave it to the people who know what they are doing. If I worked at my day job in the time it would take me to make my own, I could buy a very good one. I have been kicking around designing and making a micrometer driven macro rail for precision focus stacking though.

Hey I'm am a machinist too..CNC!
Would love to make a gimbal for my tripod.. Heck, I want to make a tripod!
Been searching grabcad and such.. i'll post if I find anything

Patent office

faw67 wrote in post #17880507
As a machinist I tend to make alot of my own equipment, and have been thinkin about making a nice tripod head, has anyone have any good drawings or blueprints that I can work off of?

https://www.youtube.co​m/watch?v=phQ6wLoJrK4 Said he would put plans on his website.

EightEleven wrote in post #18054338
Hey I'm am a machinist too..CNC!
Would love to make a gimbal for my tripod.. Heck, I want to make a tripod!
Been searching grabcad and such.. i'll post if I find anything

http://xray.uky.edu …rkin/panohead/g​imbal.html

Lots of people make their designs available, a good example is Thingiverse although it is mostly for 3D printer files it does show how many people will share there designs for stuff they create.

Have a look here, it may help http://www.mytworks.co​m …ad-line/velour-nodal-head
and here for a panoramic head http://www.loneoceans.​com/labs/panorama/
and this https://www.dvuckovic.​com/projects/panoramic​-head-v2

itsallart wrote in post #18055258
Have a look here, it may help http://www.mytworks.co​m …ad-line/velour-nodal-head
and here for a panoramic head http://www.loneoceans.​com/labs/panorama/

Wow, that Velour head sells for $5785.

Holy cow, I didn't pay attention to its price.
Here is another link which I have inserted into my previous post but may have gone unnoticed as it was an edit https://www.dvuckovic.​com/projects/panoramic​-head-v2

THanks for all the info everyone..

As far as the 3d print thing goes, so long as I have a solid file of sorts I can run it through Mastercam.

I do like the thought of a gimbal head. Having a gripped body plus the 70-200 2.8 makes things a bit heavy after a while..

3d printer files are usually .STL files so most programs should be able to open them. I checked out that Grabcad site, pretty nice, didn't know about that one.

I have a CNC router and a couple of mills in my workshop a cheap Harbor Freight X2 and a Knee Mill, my Knee Mill was even a CNC machine at one time, controlled by an Atari ST and custom hardware
my brother built. Unfortunately for me my brother removed all the stepper motors and controller before he gave it to me.

To me making stuff yourself is always a lot more satisfying then just buying ready made off the shelf stuff.

Glad to hear you found the grab gad site! I was amazed by whats on there..
I make racecar parts for Dr. Don Panoz. some very cool and very challenging stuff.
We have 2 Haas vf4ss and a Haas St20 lathe..
We use Gibbscam and Mastercam for programming.

I worked in Aerospace before I retired, we had lots of really nice CNC machines, some were over $1,000,000 for really big 5 axis machines. I remember the one Lathe was a Mazak and I believe it was over $300,000. I didn't run them, I just always wanted my own.

I have been machining and programming mills for 23 years now. Matsuuras, Mazaks, Fadals, and Haas, some old archaic knee mills, and dinosaur tape machines. I have used Gibbs since version 1, I have also used mastercam but I prefer gibbs. I have done some archery stuff, but mostly very close tolerance parts for NDT instruments. I really enjoy drawing and designing my own stuff sometimes I even actually make it.