After another member suggested adding a cold shoe to the top of the Canon Off Shoe Cord 2, so they would have some where to park the flash when not hand holding it (use for macro work, portraits, all sorts of things), I thought I would see how hard it would be to attach one.
It turns out Canon have already thought of doing just this, making the job much easier than it looks.
Before you begin I can not guarantee how strong this modification is, or how long it will last.
I can of course no be held responsible if you get it wrong.
The modification will involve cosmetic changes to the cord, and a small amount of drilling holes.
You will need:
A hot, or cold shoe. I got mine off an old Pentax off camera flash mount.
A jewelers Phillips head screwdriver
A 1.5mm or 2mm drill bit and drill
To start remove the thick black sticker with the Canon logo from the top of the camera end of the Off shoe cord.
It will reveal 3 screws underneath:
Remove the 3 screws labeled in Blue.
The screws labeled in red do not need to be removed, but can be for interests sake if your careful, and wish to see the wiring etc, inside the rest of the cord.
Once all 3 are removed carefully remove the top of the cord:
Whats revealed shows how easy this job is.
The large metal part already has holes drilled and tapped, ready for a cold shoe to be screwed on.
These holes are marked in blue.
The two holes beside each other in the top part of the cord already line up with the standard holes in a cold shoe, all you need to do now is drill out the other two holes needed in the top part of the cord.
I laid the hot shoe over the existing to holes, marked and drilled the holes.
Of course I missed, and had to make the holes bigger.
You might be better off reassembling the cord, with the cold shoe mounted with only the 2 screws in the existing holes, then marking the new ones. Disassemble before drilling of course
I found the small screws originally removed from the cord were to short, and I had to reuse the slightly longer ones removed with the shoe from the pentax mount.
Total build time was about 30mins, and I think the result looks rather good. It certainly works:
To make this a hot shoe, you would only need to install a centre contact.
The metal plate the shoe mounts to is, earthed, so the best way might be to cut out the top of the cord, and install a whole shoe assembly, mounting it to the existing plate, then carefully soldering in a contact to the side of the cord.
You could also make it an E-TTL hot shoe useing the same method, although I'm not sure how the camera would handle having two flash units sharing the same contact on the camera.
