Macro focusing rail completed.:)

[DeereGuy]

Hi everyone, just wanted to post a picture of the B-day present I made for my wife. I asked for ideas a couple of weeks ago and got some great suggestions as always. I decided to try my hand at making matching dovetails and it worked great. I had made some tool posts holders a few years back and had a cutter from that so I put it to use. I have bearings salvaged out of an old printer that are a press fit in the frame and I ground the all thread down to size for the interal bore. It's working real smooth and the wife is a happy camper..)))..

I still need to add the cork between the camera and it's mount. I picked the cork up this evening so I can pry the rail from the wifes hands for a few minutes I will put that on.

Next project of course will be a macro ring light. I did a search and got some hits. I will post my questions about one of those later if I can't find what I need in the archives.


Have fun everyone

[aostling]

I asked for ideas a couple of weeks ago and got some great suggestions as always.

I hesitate to say this, but I don't think this will work very well as a macro-focusing rail. Macro focusing is different. The screw focusing movement which works for distant objects is not very effective when the magnification is close to 1.0.

Commercial rails use a zero-backlash rack-and-pinion, a design which gives a rapid fore-and-aft movement in response to twisting the focusing knob. Moving the rack while looking through the viewfinder of the SLR you will see the image pop in and out of focus just by slightly twiddling the knob one way or the other. Your design lacks this responsiveness -- it will take too many turns of the screw to get to the plane of focus, and when you get there twiddling won't make the image pop -- it will gradually go in and out of focus. It won't be easy to find the focus point.