Coming up for Birkett - must be time to start cooking up filming kit

[Diamond Hell]

So after the success of the shoulder mount last year I thought I'd go a bit more ambitious this year.

I baulked at the £500+ cost of a jib to lift the camera up.  Silverstone has nice big banks, wouldn't it be nice to be able to put the camera on one of them and lift it up over the fences and shoot down the track?  Yeah, not £500 nice though.

This is what we were aiming for, but without the £530 price tag:



I have a workshop and some scrap, so why don't we see what we can cook up?

You know that feeling when you set yourself a target and get quite a long way down the line and think 'might have bitten off a bit much here'?

I kinda pushed through that.

Bought some skate bearings.
Scavenged some steel from a couple of mates and off a scrap pile on the farm (I think some of it may have been a bed at some point?)
Bought some weights from Wightbay for £15
Nabbed a surveyor's tripod the old man had

Got cobbling.

It's not quite finished, but it was close enough for me to put the 5D on it tonight and do a trial lift.

Here's the thing:



Yep it's about as safe as fitting an incorrect repeater indicator. 

I need to reinforce the pivot points, weld the counterbalance tube on and maybe replace the camera carrier.  I also want to replace the 20mm box at the end with some lighter wall stuff, as that will have a BIG impact on the amount of counterbalance needed.

I've also been looking at 'lazy Susan' turntables on simplybearings.co.uk - might order one of those for under a tenner to give it some smooth panning action. Oh and a couple of 25mm grubscrew collars to retain the counterbalance weights because you do NOT want 26kg of weights sliding about when you're filming, as you'll see from the quick vid that shows the first lift.  It should be noted there's another 50cm extension available on this at this point. 

http://youtu.be/RFbe5JaWtpI

All in all quite chuffed.

Not sure I'll have enough time before next weekend to source some unistrut and build the DIY slider out of that and the skateboard I bought for £5 yesterday... 

[DubFan]

Nice work.
Once you've got a means to pan the camera, then you'll be in business.

So you're going to fix those weights in place right?

I would also think you'd need a press pass or permission of some sort to take something that big to the side of the track especially if you plan to hang it over the barrier. They will want to know that it's secure, won't block anything or fall apart.
They might be ok with it if a) there's no commercial firm filming (ie you're not competing with them) and b) if you agree not to push it over the barrier, but you can be next to it.

[Diamond Hell]

Like last year I will be sporting a purple bib denoting I am allowed to rummage about track-side.

Jib will be used behind the safety fences - it can go up over them (and I don't want to walk too far with all that stuff!).

Finally scored 3m of Unistrut this lunchtime, so now I need to sort the rest of the dolly system too!  That WILL be going trackside.