Friday 15 March 2013

How to Make a GoPro Arm Strap!


Cut it fine with this one. Heading to France on a snowboarding trip in a few hours and being that my snowboarding experience currently extends to two hours in sunny Wales it wouldn't make for the most exciting snowboarding footage. Being that I still wanted to capture some of my trip I thought I'd make up for my lack of snowboarding skillz with some interesting camera angles.


The bicep strap was an idea I saw on the Swaylocks GoPro thread and had been thinking about this for a while, especially with regards to how else this strap could be used, e.g. on the ankle, on the lower thigh etc.  With this in mind I decided to modify the technique I developed with the wrist strap to come up with an adjustable bicep strap, so here we go!

1.   Find an object that sits somewhere between the circumference of your arm and your lower leg, in this case a tin of varnish. Glue some sheets of balsa wood together, two large squares and two smaller squares (big enough for a GoPro mount), and tape to the tin.


2.   Once dry trim the rough edges and flatten the top to fit the mount. In my case I chose the aluminium screw mounted device I found on ebay, this allows me to change the direction of the mount if for example I wanted to hold my arm perpendicular or mount it on my leg straight down.


3.   Tidy up the balsa to make it nice and smooth, and cut out the slots for the strap and drill holes. Fibre glass the whole thing which will greatly strengthen the holder.


4.   When top coating the glass stick down strips of neoprene and trim once dry.


5.   Tidy up the neoprene with some fancy stitching, and while you're at it sew in some 2 inch webbing and a 2 inch plastic buckle (available in your local DIY store). Maybe even do a neater job than me?


6.    Screw on your mount, just pretend that I'd had time to cut down the bolt length. If your going to use a stick on mount it's probably best to follow what I did with the wrist strap to make it secure.


7.   Attach your GoPro and go nuts! Some video footage to follow when I get home I hope!



Sunday 10 March 2013

The Beginnings of the Cobra

Juggling quite a few little projects at the moment, none of them really up to any standard worth writing too much about yet, but my biggest current project is a new hollow, wooden surfboard that's been on the drawing board for quite a while now.



It's going to be a 5'10" single fin made from tulipwood with twin obeche stripes, imagine the AC Cobra below complete with the twin Shelby racing stripes, that's the intention of this design. Basically wanting a small fast board with some cross your fingers handling. Love the feel of the pivoting carves of the 9 foot Winky, but want to transfer that feeling into a smaller, more manageable board.



Haven't gotten too far with this yet but the design is finalised and the spar and ribs stuck down onto some plywood. Currently milling some wood strips and hoping the days start getting longer soon and the weather starts to get a bit friendlier so I can getting more work done.