Lightening tripods
 

I have a Uniloc 1600 tripod. It's a marvelous piece of kit, and very stable. But heavy especially when carried several miles across the countryside. I've looked for alternatives and can't find anything that comes close in terms of versatility.

So I've looked into replacing the legs with carbon fibre ones, and the price of carbon fibre tubes is prohibitive. It'd be cheaper to cannibalise a new carbon fibre tripod or even better a used one.

Anyway, I wondered about drilling holes in the Uniloc's duralumin legs. It'd look odd, but I wonder if drilling a series of holes along each leg would lighten the weight without a significant impact on the rigidity? Has anyone tried this? Is it worth it, or do you have to remove too much metal. Or would it impact the rigidity too much?

Leif,

This is a quick call in on the forum so have not made any calculations based on wall thickness.

I have just weighed a length of aluminium 270mm long, 19mm dia, = 200 grams.

To shave any significant weight of by drilling holes suggests an awful lot of holes. I would not think that option to be a runner.

Don

Have to agree with Don on this one, in order to reduce the weight by an amount you would notice, you'd have to drill a lot of holes. Drilling one hole in a piece of metal seriously affects it's rigidity, drilling so may to reduce weight is a non-starter I'd say.

Duncan

Now there’s an interesting concept which is certainly used through industry for the same benefit. Something you could consider is drilling one side of the leg only (i.e. not through drilling both sides), if you also avoided a deliberate pattern with the holes you could well achieve some kind of a result without compromising the robustness too much.

If you can accurately measure the outside diameter and wall thickness, I will knock up a model on my cad system at work to let you know the benefits of the drilling. Unfortunately it’s not a finite element analysis system which would also tell us how heavy the camera/lens combination could be before it breaks :).

Surely it's the head and the fittings which contribute most of the weight? The tubes themselves are quite light.

Leif,

How much weight is your head having to support. I have 3 sizes of Benbo / Unilock ball heads. Medium 450 gram Small 250 gram. Big one is kinda nailed to tripod so a bit difficult to get off to weigh. I can do so if required and post a comparitive pic.

Don

The tripod weighs 2.5Kg. The ball head including quick release weighs 500g. So the total is 3Kg which is a fair bit over long distances. And then there is the padded case. I don't think the central part of the tripod (the main joint) is that heavy, maybe 1 Kg. The fittings are nylon hence fairly light.

The lower leg tubes are about 32mm and I guess the wall is about 2mm. The upper leg tubes are lighter though unfortunately they cannot really be drilled because of the way the locks on the lower tube push against the upper tube.

Leif

Leif,

The following is based on a 500mm long, 32mm diameter tube with a 2.00mm wall thickness.

The basis for the calculation is a weight reduction, expressed as a percentage of the original mass of the tube, based on 10 holes drilled in varying diameters from 2.00mm up to 20.00 (inclusive).

Further calculations can be made by multiplying the number of holes accordingly.

2.00mm……….0.07%
4.00mm……….0.27%
6.00mm……….0.60%
8.00mm……….1.08%
10.00mm……….1.69%
12.00mm……….2.45%
14.00mm……….3.36%
16.00mm……….4.44%
18.00mm……….5.68%
20.00mm……….7.12%

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Steve

Steve. Thanks. It does look like it is not really worth doing. Leif

I have visions of the tripod crumpling when you try to use it if you take to much off.:eek: