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
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