I can has a tripod.
Feb. 1st, 2012 03:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solarbirdAfter Woot! offered an HD video camera cheaply enough that I went for it, I realised I really need a better - or at least a second - tripod, and I went thrift store spelunking again. Tomorrow I'll write up a more general post on the band blog, about pawn-shop spelunking, but I'm gonna geek about this first because it was fun.
First I hit UW surplus (nothing good) and checked out an actual camera store (goddammit tall tripods are expensive) so I hit Goodwill and the pawn shop next to it on a whim and found a Slik U-210 for $15. It's a total monster of a device - the U-212 is the shorter current version, if you're curious.
It wasn't perfect - it tested okay in store, but needed serious cleaning, a new camera mount screw (trivial, hardware store), and so on. And something I thought was a mechanical fault turned out to be a design feature - at least, after the tripod was disassembled, cleaned, lubricated, and reassembled. That's the fun part. ^_^
The fault was that the elevator crank started slipping when I tried to raise the camera platform. The elevator is used to raise the camera platform beyond the already-quite-tall maximum base height provided by the tripod legs. The slippage wasn't so bad that I couldn't work with it, so I didn't mind that much; even were that hopelessly broken - and it wasn't - it'd still be a better (and taller) tripod than I've been using. It hadn't done this in my quick test in the store, though, and experiment showed that the elevator post could rotate, for no clear reason. And when it rotated, the gears no longer meshed correctly, and slipped.
Separately, all the camera adjustment points were rather more stiff than they should've been. On a good tripod, you can elevate the camera (see above), tilt back and forth, tilt left and right; it's called six-axis motion. All this worked, but it was all pretty resistant.
So instead of just doing a deep cleaning, I took the whole tripod apart as far as I could, and scrubbed and lubricated all the parts I could reach before putting it back together. I also figured out more about the mechanics and features, through experimenting, as part of the process. And I have to say, once cleaned and lubricated? "Slik" is totally the right name for this tripod. Everything mechanical is super smooth. It's nice, and the design is clever.
Anyway, that all done, I started playing with the elevator post again. I found the post's centre point and set various adjustments to try to keep it there, and everything worked great - and far more easily than before. So I thought I'd see how badly the elevator crank would slip when the centre post got rotated again, because it's not difficult to put it off-centre at all. In fact, it's so easy that it looked like a design flaw - the same things you do to rotate the camera itself left and right can also throw the elevator post off, if you forget to loosen the camera rotation clamp. (As would be inevitable.)
So I put the elevator well off-centre intentionally, and gave it a good crank - and it recentred itself, then elevated. I tried it again, all the way off the other direction, and then a couple of more times to be sure: it turns out the tripod's elevator shaft re-centres itself first every time you change elevation. The ability to get off-centre at all is apparently part of its recentring ability, and also a way of handling the torque if you try to rotate the camera body without loosening the appropriate clamp first.
And it was just dirty and jammed, and now it's not.
It's still a little weird, honestly. Maybe it's some sort of fallback feature. Fault-tolerance in hardware? I'm for it! Either way, I love it when spelunking pays off. :D
First I hit UW surplus (nothing good) and checked out an actual camera store (goddammit tall tripods are expensive) so I hit Goodwill and the pawn shop next to it on a whim and found a Slik U-210 for $15. It's a total monster of a device - the U-212 is the shorter current version, if you're curious.
It wasn't perfect - it tested okay in store, but needed serious cleaning, a new camera mount screw (trivial, hardware store), and so on. And something I thought was a mechanical fault turned out to be a design feature - at least, after the tripod was disassembled, cleaned, lubricated, and reassembled. That's the fun part. ^_^
The fault was that the elevator crank started slipping when I tried to raise the camera platform. The elevator is used to raise the camera platform beyond the already-quite-tall maximum base height provided by the tripod legs. The slippage wasn't so bad that I couldn't work with it, so I didn't mind that much; even were that hopelessly broken - and it wasn't - it'd still be a better (and taller) tripod than I've been using. It hadn't done this in my quick test in the store, though, and experiment showed that the elevator post could rotate, for no clear reason. And when it rotated, the gears no longer meshed correctly, and slipped.
Separately, all the camera adjustment points were rather more stiff than they should've been. On a good tripod, you can elevate the camera (see above), tilt back and forth, tilt left and right; it's called six-axis motion. All this worked, but it was all pretty resistant.
So instead of just doing a deep cleaning, I took the whole tripod apart as far as I could, and scrubbed and lubricated all the parts I could reach before putting it back together. I also figured out more about the mechanics and features, through experimenting, as part of the process. And I have to say, once cleaned and lubricated? "Slik" is totally the right name for this tripod. Everything mechanical is super smooth. It's nice, and the design is clever.
Anyway, that all done, I started playing with the elevator post again. I found the post's centre point and set various adjustments to try to keep it there, and everything worked great - and far more easily than before. So I thought I'd see how badly the elevator crank would slip when the centre post got rotated again, because it's not difficult to put it off-centre at all. In fact, it's so easy that it looked like a design flaw - the same things you do to rotate the camera itself left and right can also throw the elevator post off, if you forget to loosen the camera rotation clamp. (As would be inevitable.)
So I put the elevator well off-centre intentionally, and gave it a good crank - and it recentred itself, then elevated. I tried it again, all the way off the other direction, and then a couple of more times to be sure: it turns out the tripod's elevator shaft re-centres itself first every time you change elevation. The ability to get off-centre at all is apparently part of its recentring ability, and also a way of handling the torque if you try to rotate the camera body without loosening the appropriate clamp first.
And it was just dirty and jammed, and now it's not.
It's still a little weird, honestly. Maybe it's some sort of fallback feature. Fault-tolerance in hardware? I'm for it! Either way, I love it when spelunking pays off. :D
