So...we got a vest and arm from ebay, Pete built us a gymbal and sled and Sambo came over to help weight it and test it, cos he's Very Practical with nuts and bolts and suchlike.
As you can see, the Elbow joint (silver 90 angle piece) is too long - it's pitching the cam forward, which is twisting the connector to the chest plate (sigh). The guys at the Home Built Stabiliser forums had previously suggested we modify it and they were right.
We're going to trim both ends of the arm, which will mean re doing the bearings on the connector to the sled....argh!. This should give us more control and less pull forward.
The next thing is weighting.
The cam I have on there was for testing only, so we still have to weight it for the actual camera we'll be using, but I need something to practice with so anyway. What do you do when you run out of little metal weights?
We've also got a problem with the gymbal housing - the centre sleeve that clamps around the pole was press-locked into a bearing , but the minute we applied the weight it pulled free. This was a simple fix tho - we reversed the gymbal head so that the centre sleeve is pulled onto the bearing by gravity - which is fine, except when I put the thing down, when it uncouples again...
I'll post some pics when we start work on that so anyone else who is trying can get a few pointers and avoid the mistakes we're making :-)
As Dion (cinematographer extraordinaire) says, 'Why didnt you just do a song we could shoot on Train Tracks???'...maybe next time?
MJEB