First, I adjust the tripod’s center column so that it’s a good 3 or 4 inches high. To get the best stability out of this mount, attach it to your camera tripod in such a way that the tripod head carries none of the load. Cut to length, glue them into the sockets, and you’re done. Add to this, the depth of the sockets on both parts, and you now have your dowel lengths. (The reason for doing this will become apparent later.) Measure the space between the top of the tripod ring and the bottom of the platter. Now here’s the important step: raise the tripod’s center column up 1 to 1½ inches. Next, attach the platter to the tripod head. To do this, slide the ring down the tripod legs until it comes to a rest and is level. The final step in assembling the platter is to determine the correct length for the three dowels. When done, you should have a piece that looks like the one shown above. For my mount the inner ring diameter is about 7 inches. To complete the ring, cut out the inside of the disk. Make a matching set of socket holes on the underside of the platter. Don’t go all the way through the plywood because these holes will be sockets for the dowels - halfway is fine. Next, using a bit that matches the diameter of your dowels, drill three holes (again spaced at 120° intervals but offset from the first three by 60°) along the circumference of the outer circle. The diameter of these holes should roughly match the diameter of your tripod’s legs. One circle has a radius ¾-inch less than the disk itself and the other circle’s radius defines the inside diameter of the ring.īefore you cut out the ring though, use a Forstner or spade bit to drill three evenly spaced holes along the circumference of this inner circle. To make the tripod ring, take the third plywood disk and draw two concentric circles on it. Three dowels join the platter to this ring and act as supports. The plywood ring slides down the legs until the spacing between the legs prevents it from going farther. The idea is to offload the mass of the binoculars and the platter from the tripod head, directly to the tripod’s legs. Simply attaching the platter to a tripod results in a very wobbly mount. The aluminum beam needs to be long enough to prevent your shoulder from bumping into the mount when using your binoculars - about 14 inches from the edge of the platter should be about right. This offset also helps ensure that the mass of the binoculars lies along a line that passes through the pivot center. Note that the beam is offset about 1¼ inches from the center of the disk to clear the pivot bolt. The binoculars themselves attach to an aluminum beam that bolts to the top of the platter via hand knobs threaded into matching T-nuts. The binocular support beam is attached with two hand knobs for easy disassembly. I use a readily available right-angle tripod adapter purchased from a photo store and a camera ball head to mate my binoculars to the aluminum beam. The whole assembly consists of two disks, a ring, and a small block all made from plywood, three lengths of ¾-inch dowel, and a 38-inch-long piece of 1-inch square aluminum tubing. The main part of my bino mount is a platter similar to the azimuth part of a Dobsonian telescope base. Keeping things as simple as possible was job #1. The easy-go-round mount you see here is what I came up with. All I needed was something to hold the binoculars steady while I viewed the sky from my reclining deck chair. Such a device works great, but its construction is complicated by including features I don’t want. Most dedicated binocular mounts are of the parallelogram variety. Since I’m too cheap to buy stuff, clearly, I was going to have to build something. I tried a standard camera tripod, but that turned out to literally be a pain in the neck. Obviously, the heavier the binos and the greater the magnification, the more crucial support is for optimum performance. You can see so much more when you eliminate the dreaded jiggles. For the first time I really felt that I needed some kind of binocular support. Recently, my collection expanded to include particularly heavy 10×50s and inexpensive 15×70s. At least, that’s my excuse for cluttering the house with a dozen (at last count) of these double-barreled optical wonders. Build this simple device for steady binocular views of the night sky.
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