Desk webcam mount
6 Sep 2017If your wondering how I got the videos in the last post, here’s how.
Maybe I should have just brought a cheap microphone mount and converted it, but I didn’t think of that at the time.
The mount I have is designed for 3 monitors, the 3rd attaching to the top of the center post, and as I’m not use it for that I thought it’d make a good support.
The design is simple, a main arm that locks around this post with a grip that can slide along it and hold a pole with a camera mount on the bottom. It’s going to be holding a C920 so weight isn’t a worry, and since that has a 1/4" nut on the bottom I can use a normal tripod shoe-plate.
The clamps
The clamp doesn’t need to be anything fancy, or really strong, so I’m making it out of ply. The pole is 35mm and my forstner bits are imperial so the closest I could get was about 36mm, but that should grip fine. As I had some threaded inserts left over from building my desk I used those, shorter ones would have been nice but these will do. To tighten them up I used some torx M6 bolts I had left over from another project.
Here’s the parts after the majority of the work had been done. I cleaned up the edges and rounded off the corners as you’ll see later.
The arm
The arm needs to be about 500mm long so I can get the camera over the middle of my desk. Apart from that, and needing a slot in the middle for the grip, there isn’t really much to the design.
The grip
This is made out of 4 parts. Two ‘rings’ that go top and bottom, a front-plate to hold a threaded insert and a block on the back that the bolt pushes into. As the bolt is screwed in it pushes the block behind onto the pole, which pushes onto the back on the rings, which holds it in place.
The arm goes around the block so the grip and slide along even when you’ve locked the height.
Finishing up
As you can see, it works well.
I did forget how much varnish adds to the thickness of the parts as I had to adjust the rings when I tried to assemble it, even though it worked fine before.
The swivel at the bottom of the pole isn’t perfect, as it had a bit of wobble, but the cable and weight of the camera stops this from being a problem.
The mount isn’t perfectly ridged, so if the desk wobbles the picture does. That said, I think it’s more down to the desk then the mount, I do need to remake the frame but that would mean clearing the desk (and the rest of the room) so I’m putting it off at the moment.
