I have a short one for you today, as my time has been waylaid by someone hitting a streetlight in front of my neighbor’s business and knocking it down onto his building and the side of my gate. Very annoying. But I did manage to make a small amount of progress on the leg locks for the Universal Panoramic and Tilting Head Tripod. I think I mentioned last time that 4 of the leg lock assemblies were seized together, and I set about making replacement parts so the tripod can be reassembled. To complete this, I had to order a left-hand tap and die. The leg locks are an ingenious arrangement of a steel hoop that fits around the wooden section of a tripod leg, and has attached to it, essentially, a screw and a nut. When the screw is turned, the nut squeezes the leg section together to lock it in place. I made the new screws from left-hand threaded rod, but the nuts had to be custom machined. In order to avoid a repeat of the seizing problem, the screw is steel and the nuts are machined from brass. I cut sections from the threaded rod and machined a stem on one end with a cone-shaped hole in the bottom of the stem. The cone-shaped hole was made so that the end of the threaded rod could be fit to the original part of the leg lock and the hole could be peened over so the two parts were permanently attached. The brass nuts are a pretty straightforward part. They are machined to have a shoulder on one end, a left-hand threaded hole, and a slot for the key-shaped grip to be mounted in. The most difficult part of this whole process was getting the dowel pin hole on the new parts to line up properly with the mounting hold on the original key-shaped grips. That is all completed now, it all just needs to be put back together. Then I still need to make a replacement brass lower leg cuff and reinstall the two remaining ones. Gates must be dealt with first though, alas.
