Ball socket tubing for camera lighting

[mattaphore]

Hey all you DIYers,

I (graduate student on modest income) have started building a tray and lighting arms for my point & shoot Ikelite underwater camera housing. I've machined my tray out of Delrin and I'm going to be securing some PVC piping to make some lighting arms... (I'll also soon be spec'ing out some high power LEDs/drivers for my lights).

Doing a quick search for ball socket arms, I found that the professional setups easily cost 100s of dollars. I've been tempted to pull apart a Joby Gorillapod and use the legs as bendable lighting arms but then I found these: Aquarium Ball Socket Tubes, and I was wondering if anyone aquarists out there has experience with these.

A little more digging around the web led me to Modularhose.com, who makes the "Loc-Line" stuff for about $6 per foot. It looks pretty sturdy and it's meant for all sorts of industrial applications like coolant fluid jets for cutting tools... and at $6/ft it's a lot cheaper than Ikelite's ball-socket arms.



Seems like it would do the same job and it's meant for handling aquarium water, so salt water shouldn't be a problem. I'm not sure how easily the tubing pulls apart, but I figure running a length of 550-paracord through the tubing and tying it off on either end should keep it from coming apart.

Hopefully with a bit of machining in my school's machine shop, I should be able to save a couple bucks Also, if I end up getting the Loc-Line, I'll update you all on how it goes.

 

[herman]

I have used lock line for a good many years (from modular hose) and it works great. It is not difficult to seperate but it takes quite a bit of force. You have to bend it at a joint and basically use a breaking motion to sererate it. I have never had it come apart by accident but nothing wrong with a little paracord inside. With my strobe- an Inon D-180 - it will not hold the strobe up on land but underwater it is fine. Keep looking on the M H site, they have some connectors/adapters that are useful. Also, to connect the tubing to most of them require a double ended female adapter so plan on getting a couple of those as well.

 

[mattaphore]

Many thanks for the feedback! I will definitely check out the connectors and the double ended adapters.

 

[Camerone]

This stuff's been around for years as a DIY strobe/arm/mount system. If you need to stiffen it up for weight supporting reasons, you can get some heat shrink tubing in large diameter sizes from most good electronic parts houses (i.e. not Radio Shack, but most large cities have a surplus/hobby place that will carry it.) Slip the tubing over the loc-line and shrink it with a heat gun or a hair dryer. The added stiffness will let the loc-line carry more weight.

Personally, I use the 3/4" flow "nipples" on the end, and a rubber stopper from the scuba department at Home Depot (i.e. plumbing) or swiped from a chem lab inside to mount strobes at the top. Put the rubber stopper inside the 3/4" flow nipple, pass a bolt through a washer, the stopper, and then another washer outside the 3/4" nipple, then secure with a single nylock nut. Tightening it down expands the rubber stopper, locking it in place, and you have a standard bolt end to screw to your light/strobe/whatever mount. Then snap that assembly to the upper end of the loc-line.

Loc-line to base is best done with a snap-on to 3/4" pipe fitting. Drill your delrin base, then just tap the hole and screw in. Very, very trivial.