Cool
Hey guys, it's Devin here with Make Anything and thanks to all the people supporting me on Patreon
I'm able to slowly upgrade this channel and increase the quality of my videos
So you might notice that the lighting has improved a bit over the past videos?
And that's thanks to them and one of my more recent additions. Is this Joby tripod. It's a kind of flexible tripod
That's really useful for getting into tight situations, or just setting up shots really quickly
I really love this thing, but one of the problems that comes with introducing a second tripod
Is that there's no real standard for the mounting plates
we've got this little square mounting plate, and then my older tripod here
Have a completely different mount so it's pretty annoying when you have to completely
Unscrew and rescrew in the different plates just to use the different tripods
You can imagine if I'm switching back and forth between them a lot it becomes quite an annoyance
Today I decided to solve this problem once and for all by designing a smart solution
That lets me use both of these tripods
without ever having to unscrew the mounting plate
Even fewer of you have these specific two tripods, but I think this is a pretty interesting design challenge
and you might enjoy the process so let's go ahead and
solve this
Here's the tripod I've been using since day one. It's got some broken parts, but overall it works alright
It's got this spring-loaded lever to release the mounting plate
And you can just pop it right back in just like that
This Joby mounting plate uses a screw on the side that holds it into place and since this one is smaller
I figure we'll attach that to the camera and somehow modify the old tripod
It's just a little too wide to fit flush in there, so we'll probably have to keep it above that line
And I just need some kind of plastic structure so that this old lever will hold everything into place
The first thing we need to do is get the measurements for all these parts
so I'm going to use one of my favorite tools: the digital calipers to get all these different measurements and
You basically want to record as much information as you can
To the point where you can pretty much recreate the whole thing or at least the important parts
So we definitely want to get these ridges. We want to know the depth of this groove and so on
For this other tripod we could measure this area here
But it'll be easier to measure the amount itself
Inside of these kind of weird spaces which doesn't really work
So I'll just measure the other amount as well, the one we're trying to replace
I noticed this old build plate isn't flush with the tripod
in fact the lip is almost the same thickness as this lip on the new mounting plate
so I should be able to fit it flush into a part that replicates that old mount
Often times, I just measure as I go along designing, but in this case
I just sketched out everything so that I had it ready to go and I could model it nice and easily
So I'm going to open up fusion 360 and I'll start by drawing a sketch on this front plain
I'll use the line tool to draw out the side profile of the old mounting plate,
So I can right click on this and have it centered on the origin. Which is generally good practice
It's nice to have things related to the origin so that everything lines up easily
Now I'll just input all the dimensions that I measured from the actual mounting plate,
Now I can extrude this to match the width that I measured as well
For the direction I'll use symmetric, that way it stays centered over the origin
since it's extruding in both directions
So this is pretty much the basic shape of that old mounting plate
Now I'll start another sketch on this perpendicular plane
And for this one I'm just going to sketch out the profile for that new mounting plate
Once again I'll start out with a rough line drawing and to make things a little easier,
I can just mirror this across the centerline
Now I'll just move this profile down and line it up with the old mounting plate how I want it to connect
I want this to nearly be flush, but I need to make sure that there's enough space on the bottom here
So that there's enough material to make my part strong, so I'll make that three millimeters, and that should do the job
I'll do another extrude now
But this time I'm going to cut away from that original shape instead of creating a new body
so now I've basically created a void that would theoretically nestle that new Joby tripod Mount
The only problem is you wouldn't actually be able to get the mount in there because, well
There's no way to slide it in so what we're going to do is cut this part in half
I'll draw a sketch on this top surface here and just do a line straight through the part right in the middle
I'll hit 's' to open up the search and type in split
I'll use that split body command and use that line as the splitting tool
Now it doesn't look like anything happened
but if I open up this drop down menu you'll see I actually have two bodies instead of one
And we could change this visual style to show the edges so that we can see that split right there
The next thing we need to do is come up with a way to stick these two halves together in a nice secure way
So what I'm going to do is create some kind of joint here between the two parts
I'll create a centerline to make this symmetrical
I'll make the angle here 40 degrees. Which is pretty steep, but it can still be printed without support material
So that should be good
I'll mirror this across my center line, and then I'll do an extrude cut through this shape to create this groove.
Now I'll work on the other half to create the corresponding tongue to fit into this groove
I'll go ahead and change the visual style again to make those hidden edges visible
So I can see that groove from the back here
And I'll open up my sketches here and make that sketch visible again of those grooves that I just cut out
This way I can hit 'p' and use the project command to bring those lines into my new sketch
With that done I can now offset this groove and create some tolerance
Since you always want to have some space between two parts that are sliding together
I'll go with 0.2 millimeters here. Which should make a nice snug fit
These offset lines are just a bit too short
So I'll go ahead and use the extend line to extend those to the edge of this part
That's going to create this closed contour that I can extrude and make the corresponding tongue for this groove
I'll have it extrude to this object and give it just a small offset so that it remains a separate part
There we go now we have these two parts that can be joined together and they should pretty much lock into place
Now I'll just do some small details
Adding chamfers and fillets around the edges to make things look nicer and to be not so sharp.
Oh and of course there's one important thing that I forgot to do which is to give some tolerance to this sketch as well
So we want to make sure that there's space for my new plate to slide in and not be too tight
To start out I'm just going to give this a tiny 0.12 millimeter tolerance because we want this to be a really tight fit
we don't want the part to be able to wiggle around at all or it won't make a very good tripod mount
If we take a look at that extrude cut feature you'll see that it's automatically updated
Okay, now I can go ahead and add the fillets to all these outer edges
There we go. It's ready to print so all I have to do is right-click on these bodies
Here I am printing the two parts out side by side and here's the final result.
Yeah, that's a really nice fit and it also fits pretty well inside of this tripod mount although it could be a little wider
Now we just have to make sure that the Joby mount fits inside of this part, so we'll go ahead and slide this in
And.. It's a really snug fit, a bit too tight
I mean, we want it to be a pretty tight fit, but if it's this difficult to take apart
it's not really helping my cause
0.25 millimeter tolerance. I also made this entire part half a millimeter wider, so it's a really good fit now
Alright, so once again, we're going to try sliding this part into place and once again, it's still a little bit too tight
So third time's a charm. I went back and I changed that tolerance now to 0.35 millimeters.
Now it's pretty much perfect. It slides in there super easily, but it still doesn't wiggle around
Everything looks really good and it fits into this tripod
So now i guess we gotta have to attach the camera and make sure everything works as it should
So I'm going to take off my traditional tripod mount,
you gotta use a coin to unscrew it, so you can understand why it's so annoying
and now I'll attach this new Joby Mount
Not surprisingly everything works as it should because of course this mount was made for this tripod
but the real test is to see if i can use my mod with the old tripod
So i'm gonna slide these parts into place
and they come together really nice and easily
and let's just go ahead and pop this in
and see if we can operate the camera
Yeah!
Everything seems to be working really well it's not rattling around or anything
in fact I can shake the whole thing around and turn it on its side
and everything holds in place super sturdy, and I'm really confident in this connection
It seems perfect, and it's just as easy to take apart as it was to put together
All right, there it is, my quick design solution. So now I can use both of these tripods a lot easier.
And you just gotta love those satisfying clicks that you can get with 3D printed parts.
I hope you guys like this one
I think it's a great example of how a little bit of clever design thinking can solve problems big and small
After all that's what design is meant to do I'm really looking forward to using these new tools in my future videos
to continue making quality content and keeping you all inspired
so until next time, I'm Devin, and this is Make Anything
And yeah, stay inspired, of course!