My brother and I built a camera mount for my bike. The mount itself is very simple. We took the pan-head off of a mini-tripod, the kind that is used for your standard consumer digital camera, so that we could have a simple pan and tilt system without trying to build it ourselves. Then we attached the head to a pre-threaded pipe that is approximately 7″ long and 1″ in diameter. The pipe came with a metal cap that screwed onto either end of it. Luckily, most tripod heads come with a hole for attaching a single leg in the center. Finding the right screw to fit the hole was easy since most tripods, digital cameras and camcorders alike, use 1/4-20″ screws. Some also use 3/8″ screws but I haven’t run into that yet. The real trick was attaching this to the bike. We had an old green Fuji with a bike rack sitting around so we attached it to that with some hose clamps. This proved to be the most challenging part, once you get those little bastards open they never want to clamp shut again! The real ticket was wrapping the pipe with the pan-head mounted to it in an old inner-tube. Otherwise we would have had metal on metal between the bike rack and the camera mount. This simple little layer of rubber seems to absorb the majority of the vibrations caused by the bicycle. It may not be the perfect way to create tracking shots but I’m pretty impressed with the results myself.
Check it!
Bikecam from Alice Shindelar on Vimeo.
Thanks Joe!
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