DIY Equipment

[pcscuba]

Just to let everyone know, you can get a 4-1/2" ID piece of acrylic from mcmaster-carr for $22.62. It fits the Powersonic 12volt PS-1270 perfect. It's more expensive than PVC but it should work. Airspeed has it in their book so it should work.

 

[DailyLunatic]

Love the housing. How did you cut the o-ring grooves into the PVC? I assume you have some sort of groove where the plexi covers each end.

Thanks
DL

Padipro once bubbled...
I've been building some of my own diving equipment for years and was wondering what types of equipment others have built?

I've successfully built a video camera housing as well as a lighting system to go with it. I've also built a 50 watt canister light and an O2 analizer. The reason I'm wondering is that on the local boats here in South Florida I seem to get a lot of strange looks when people ask where I bought some of this equipment and I tell them I built it. I was under the impression that DIY stuff was quite common but I'm begining to think I'm mistaken.

Thanks,

Scott

Dive Light

Camera Housing

 

[Padipro]

First you have to cut the main body of the housing to the correct length for your camera and square up the ends. Then cut 2 each, 2 1/8 inch wide "Rings" from the original PVC tube you bought. Place one ring at a time in the oven at 400 degrees for 5 minutes. PVC turnes to rubber when it's heated. Once the ring is soft stretch it over the main body tube and push the assembly against a smooth surface that won't be harmed by the heat to make sure the ends of both pieces are flush. Let the whole thing cool and repeat for the other ring.

Mark everything so that you know exactly which end and what position the rings came from, PVC isn't exactly round and you want everything back in the same position for a good glue joint later. Remove the rings and square up the all the ends.

Using a router and a 1/4 inch rabbit bit cut a square groove on the outside surface of the main tube on both ends that is 1/8 inch deep. The groove will be 1/4 inch wide because the bit is made to make a 1/4 inch cut. There won't be much material left in the wall of the tube after the cut but that's ok as long as there is something left. Clean all mating surfaces with PVC cleaner and slop a bunch of PVC glue on the outside end of the main tube and the inside of the the appropriate ring. Place the ring over the end of the main tube and again press it against a a smooth surface to flush up the ends. I used the garage floor for all of this. Using a small screwdriver or something close, clean the excess glue from the groove that was formed by the two parts.

This is your O-ring groove. The rings also serve to increase the thickness of the tube walls so the screws for the latches have some material to bite into and not go all the way through the wall of the main tube.

Hope that explains it.

Scott

 

[DailyLunatic]

Padipro once bubbled...
First you have to...

<SNIP>...

Hope that explains it.

Sure does. I like your way better than what I had worked out. Basicly push the rings ~1/16 (or whatever would work based on the Parker Oring catalog) past the inner PVC tube and form an "L" rather than "U" shaped groove.

Gonna have to get that router table after all.

How brittle is the PVC. Does it chip badly when routed?

Thanks
DL

 

[Padipro]

You really don't need a table to do the routing. If you hold it steady enough and take it slow you can do it by hand. Of course that would give you a good excuse to finally buy one. LOL

PVC is pretty tough stuff. It will chip and crack if you pound on it but it will take quite a beating. The one thing you need to be careful of is getting the stuff to hot while routing it. Remember it gets soft when heated so take it slow and only do a little at a time over several passes.

If you can find a smaller rabbit bit you could even use a thinner O-ring. I've seen several 1/8 inch bits but they are the ball bearing type and run about $30 each. I desided to stick with the cheap piloted bit but I wasn't able to find it in the 1/8 size. The O-ring should seal just as good and it would leave you a bit more material on the inner wall of the main body tube.

You can make the handles from PVC as well. I cut a piece off the original tube about 20 inches long, split it from end to end down one side, heated it up in the oven and then laied it flat on the floor with a piece of plywood and several air tanks on top of it to keep it flat until it cooled. That gave me a flat sheet of PVC to shape my handle from. Once I had the rough size of the handle cut I built the jig in the attached picture, placed the main body upside down in the jig, heated the flat piece again, laied it on top of the body and clamped two smaller pieces of plywood on each side to hold everything flat and in place until it all cooled. I then cut it to the final shape and size I wanted. The entire handle looked like an aircraft wing and there was a huge surface area to glue the two pieces together. It's very strong and you can carry the weight of the entire housing with just one side of it. The actual hand grips were made of 1 inch solid brass for the extra weight. I drilled the center of each grip and tapped it, then threaded a piece of SS threaded rod in it and found some flush philips head threaded nuts to screw everything into.

Scott

 

[DailyLunatic]

Padipro once bubbled...

Sorry... Couple more questions on the video housing you did...

Why 3/4" thick Plexi? Just sounds so thick. Glass people are looking into getting me some, none available at the local hardware stores. I wanted to know the rational for it. Screw depth, and flex are the two things I can think of.

I assume you used 6" Sch40 PVC? I can also get Sch80 and thought it might solve the thin wall prob at the oring groove(assuming the smaller ID still allows for the camera to fit of course) I was wondering your thoughts on how the Sch80 rings would heat/stretch around the main body. I had though about getting a coupling and cutting it down. (again, have to check dims to see if, this time, it meets the 2-1/8" min. dim. you specified)

Last one today... Where did you find the LCD screen you mounted in the housing? I don't even know where to start looking for that sort of thing.

With any luck in a few weeks I'll stop bugging you with questions on the housing and start bugging you with questions on the lights.

Thanks
DL

 

[Padipro]

I originally used 1/2 inch Plexiglas for the lens on my first housing but it used some long bolts to hold the lens on. When I tried the 1/2 inch with the latches on my latest housing, you're right, it would flex. The next size up I could find was 3/4 and it worked great. Try looking in the yellow pages for plastic dealers and see if they have some scrap pieces laying around that are big enough to make the lenses from. I tried to buy a single piece of the 3/4 at first and quickly found out it was very expensive. The scraps I got only cost me a couple of dollars each.

My original housing used 1/2 thick pressure pipe. Talk about heavy stuff, with the exception of the 1/2 thick lenses I'll bet that thing could have withstood a 1000 feet of pressure. LOL The rings took a little longer to heat up and were a little more difficult to stretch but they worked. They don't actually need to be 2 and 1/8 inches wide. The 2 inch dim is just to make it wide enough to install the controls into the housing with out them falling on the edge of the ring, a mistake I made on my first housing. The extra 1/8 inch is so when you square up all the edges you'll wind up with a ring about 2 inches wide. You can make them any size you like, 3 inches would work too if that's what you want to use. It really doesn't matter.

The little LCD monitor is from Radio Shack. It's actually a 2 1/2 inch color LCD TV with audio/video inputs. I removed the antenna and ran a cable from the cameras video outputs to the monitors inputs and then attached the monitor to the camera tray so everything can be removed as one unit from the housing. I just saw the monitor advertised in the RS flyer last week for something like $59.95. Just make sure whatever TV you use has the audio/video inputs and it should work.

If you have any more question just ask, it's really no trouble. If you can post a few pictures of your housing as you're building it on my MSN site I'm sure that others would appreciate it. People are always asking me for more pictures and info on my housing but I wasn't thinking about that when I built mine and I don't have any picture of it during construction.

Thanks,

Scott

 

[radarguy]

Howdy,
You really intrique me with your camera housing. I have been wanting to build one but just waiting until I get bored with stills. It looks like a PVC fitting but i can't seem to figure out which one. Do you mind explaining how you designed and or built the O-ring grooves as that is really the most important part to me.
Thanks,
Russ

 

[Padipro]

It's not a fitting, it's all custom made from 6 inch diameter PVC tubing. I'm working on a set of plans for the housing but it's taking me a while to write everything down. I'll post what I have on the MSN site and then just update the plans as I write more.

Scott

 

[Tommygun53]

Padipro , I couldnt resist adding the rca lcd tv monitor to my camera. everything went fine with the installation but when I checked to see if it worked,the picture on the screen looked more like a ghost video and you couldnt really make out anything. I tried a second monitor at the store and it did the same thing. Did you have this problem? Maybe its my camera or cable,I thought ,but then I hooked it up to another brand monitor and everything worked fine. Any thoughts?

Thanks , Tom