Rob is an Industrial Designer and is always on the prototyping materials. We think he may have found one with InstaMorph. In his project, he made a custom mount for his GoPro camera.
“Anyone who knows what a GoPro camera is knows how cool it is. However, they only run about 2.5 hours and always seem to die about 10-minutes before you want them to. I’ve begun plugging an external battery into mine to power it for a dozen hours or more. The problem is, when it is in its case, you can’t plug anything in and when the camera is out of its clear plastic case, it’s really hard to mount it to anything without a lot of tape, string and rigging craziness. I rarely need the water proof case so I needed a way to easily mount the camera. I saw InstaMorph on Amazon.com while looking for some plaster and was intrigued. So, I built a mount for my GoPro.
What is especially great about the material is that it has a pretty high friction coefficient and it’s flexible without memory. When I built the bracket is was just a rectangular band and the friction was good enough to do the job, I’m sure. But, I felt like it needed a bit of retention just in case. I read on the site about welding and then took the lighter technique a step further and used a small propane torch, like the ones chefs use to caramelize the top of a Crème Brule. I welded some small tabs across the top of the band and also added an eyelet so I can hang it. The small tabs make sure the camera does not slip out but they are flexible enough to bend up while inserting and removing the camera body. The tabs then return to their position.
I was able to drill the material and I also used a band saw. As long as you use slow speeds to keep the material from getting hot from friction, you can work on it with electric hand tools. You can even sand it if you go slowly and use various grits. I haven’t tried to paint it yet and I do plan to do some dyeing tests per the website’s instructions.
This is my first project with this very unique material. It’s incredible. I behaves much like nylon and aside from the low melting point, I can’t imagine any material that is as useful for a hobbyist.”
Thanks for the detailed explanation and all the great pictures Rob. You’re project sure does look good.
It seems like GoPro cameras and InstaMorph go well together, as this is the second project where we’ve seen the two combined. The first was a GoPro camera cage submitted by Will.