Infrequent Flyer - Rebuild of a Steadicam Flyer

[Calum Tsang]

It's been almost two years since I started on a project to repair and learn how to operate a Steadicam, and I thought I'd write down some of the modifications and changes in case anyone is interested in such a thing, everything from washing the vest to prototyping new parts for it.

I've been following the Steadicam for a while: In 1997, at SMPTE'97 in Sydney, I saw a Steadicam (ProVid) being demonstrated and I played around with it a bit--it was such an intriguing invention.  Over the years I've kept track of prices of low end Steadicam Pilot kits but I have no professional need of such a thing: I just found them interesting. 

In June 2022, I noticed a local classified ad offering a "Steadicam Pilot" which had an arm significantly different than the Pilots I'd seen offered before.  It was put up for sale for $400, which as far as I can tell, was about half the going rate for a Pilot here in Toronto.  I visited the seller, who pulled out the giant nylon bag and showed me its contents.  As I guessed, it was actually a Flyer.

It turns out he'd had it for his business several years ago but never got much use out of it; subsequent potential buyers would come and look at it, and one even bought it and took it away, quickly returning when they realized the system was not a plug and play gimbal you could whip out quickly when you saw the mother of the bride hamming it up on the dance floor with Uncle Ed.  The seller warned me, this was not a turnkey system.  But I knew what I was buying into: I was purchasing a two year science project.

I wanted to figure out how to restore it and operate it, purely for fun.

The Original System

So $400 later, I came home with the following:

• Flyer "grey arm" with two "bones".
• Flyer vest, complete minus one oval plate
• Flyer/Mini original post/sled, narrow diameter with red trim knobs and Sony NP1 NiCAD battery boxes
• Flyer/Mini dovetail plate
• Flyer docking plate
• A generic NTSC SD analog LCD monitor
• The giant black nylon bag

The bag included a random assortment of objects like a text-adventure video game: One flat 10 pound dumb bell weight, a 14.4V NiMH Anton Bauer battery pack with the property tag of a local rental house, and a pair of brass door hinges, taped together with black electrical tape.  It also included a photocopied excerpt of the Steadicam Operators Handbook and various printouts of Internet websites from a decade ago.

What it did not include was the collapsible C stand apparently it came with from the factory.

My goals would be to:

• Fly a Canon C100 with wireless transmission system for live events
• Replace the SD monitor with a cheap HD monitor of some sort
• Replace the battery system with some sort of unified power source for everything on the rig.=

Washing the Vest and the Padded Case

I thought the first task was to wash the vest, given these items are worn and probably sweated into extensively. There is very little information about how to wash a Steadicam vest, with most posts suggesting you spray the thing with disinfectant or leave it out in the sun.  You can in fact wash it, but you do have to carefully disassemble everything.  The hard items like the metal frame that comes across your chest and plastic buckles can be detached and wiped with a Lysol wipe or similar disinfectant spray.

The soft vest pieces are made of foam padding blocks encased in a nylon cover.  You can unwrap those padding pieces and wash them by hand in soap andwater, leaving them to dry.  Any metal elements attached to the soft vest can be unscrewed and removed--in the case of the Flyer vest, the front brace has a set of bolts which go through the fabric--then the entire nylon assembly can be washed separately.  To wash those nylon fabric parts, I used Lysol Laundry Additive, which kills bacteria and germs without damaging fabric colour, and soaked the nylon pieces for a few hours in a tub of warm water.  Periodically, I would squeeze them to get more liquid through the nylon fabric.  Then, I wrung them out in clean water and let the air dry after patting them down with towels.

The nylon bag I got had been left in storage out in a shed.  This bag also comes apart, with foam padding and durable plastic insert panels in each wall.  If you look carefully inside the case once the foam blocks that hold the Steadicam are removed, you'll see internal zippers and folds where the padding and inserts can be accessed.  Once they're out, the whole nylon case can be put into a washing machine.  To rebuild the bag, it's easiest to roll the plastic inserts into a cylinder, then insert them into the inner folds of the bag and slowly unroll them into shape.

 

[Calum Tsang]

Battery System 2023 Attempt

I wanted to power the entire rig from one power source and I wanted this source to be cheap and plentiful if I needed to buy more batteries.

After looking up replacement NP1 batteries, it was clear I needed to replace the original battery setup completely.  In the years since NP1 chocolate bars were popular for Betacams and the like, I had assumed someone had made a cheap NP1 Lithium Ion replacement, but they are actually fairly expensive.  One option was Sony F-type or Canon LP-E6 style batteries, while cheap and plentiful, were small in capacity.  I had also considered going to V Mount or Anton Bauer, which had many cheap brackets/cables available in the aftermarket, but a quick back of the envelope calculation showed these cine/broadcast specific batteries were almost double the price.

If you look at price per watt hour, there is nothing cheaper than using power tool batteries.

I settled on using Ryobi 18V power tool batteries.  One reason is I already had a 4Ah from a weedwhacker and these are easily found at any Home Depot, but another reason is that they have integral voltage cutout circuitry, which is critical for managing Lithium Ion cells.  If you let them run too low, they can't be recovered.  In DeWalt and other systems, that circuitry is in every tool, in Ryobi, it's in every battery.   If you put a load on a DeWalt battery, it will eventually run below a safe voltage and the battery will never be able to be recharged.  I'd also need to adapt the physical shape of the Ryobi battery to the lower "paddle" of the Flyer as well as convert the raw 18V DC output to some constant voltage around the rig.

To adapt the physical shape of the Ryobi battery, I found an STL model on Thingiverse that someone had already modelled quite accurately:

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4129039/files

This is a two piece model which has the Ryobi "stalk", a leftover from the original sub-AA NiCAD cell design of early 18V batteries, and an interface plate which has indents for the spring loaded clips on the battery itself.

To convert the voltage, I found a multitude of DC to DC converter boards on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.ca/s?k=lm2596+dc-dc+buck+voltage+converters

Many are based around the TI LM2596 integrated circuit, which is basically a single chip DC to DC converter with a bit of support circuitry around them.  The input voltage range is 4.5 to 40V DC and you set the output voltage using a trimpot.  The only problem with this setup is a current limit of 3A.  This would be a problem later, but given their inexpensive price, I figured I'd go with this to start.

https://www.ti.com/product/LM2596#params

From there, I designed a shroud which would capture the metal "paddle" of the Flyer on one end, the Ryobi plate on the other, and have enough space for the voltage conversion inside.  I did this in Autodesk Fusion360 and it was easy to mockup the Steadicam original parts, the Ryobi battery, the already designed Thingiverse plate, all together, then export for 3D printing.

I had to print the first attempt in multiple pieces, using Lego Technic pins as alignment dowels, but amazingly, this initial draft worked perfectly.  The batteries snapped in solidly and out came "clean" 8.4V DC power.

 

 

[Bryan Bullard]

Interested to see more of this....

[Calum Tsang]

Thanks, I'll try to write up more parts to this journey!

[Calum Tsang]

HD Video and Display

Another early requirement was to get a new, brighter LCD preview display onto the Flyer.  While it didn't have to be HD, it would be nice to have something higher quality.  At the same time, as the C100 only has HDMI out, with no provision for HD SDI, the analog composite cabling of the old Flyer had to go. 

I picked a Lilliput A7S 7" monitor, primarily because of these attributes:

• It has a native 1920x1200 panel that is bright enough for the indoor operation I was likely to use the Steadicam for
• It supports variable DC voltage power
• It has 1/4" 20 mounting positions on top and bottom, plus a VESA bracket mount
• It was fairly cheap compared to other solutions like SmallHD

Because of those mounts, it was easy to unscrew the old Steadicam generic monitor and put the A7S in its place:

The A7S monitor uses HDMI inputs which suits the C100 fine, but the major obstacle became fitting a video cable down the very narrow original Flyer sled post.  The original analog video cable and DC power wires were thin enough for the half inch ID pipe, and while an HDMI cable was snug, the connector head of the regular HDMI cable was impossible to pass through.  Cutting off an HDMI connector and resoldering it on the other end of the post was a non starter, the HDMI standard uses multiple pins, differential signalling, and a 100MHz plus bandwidth.  Soldering twenty small pitch pins was not going to be possible by an amateur.

What I did realize was that a micro HDMI cable, from my time at BlackBerry, would fit through the connector very carefully.  If I trimmed the rubber connector head, it would fit through from the top stage down through the post and out towards the LCD monitor.  Once through the post, I could use a cheap micro HDMI to regular HDMI adapter from Amazon.

I soldered up the output from the new battery box I made, and connected it to the monitor.  Powering the C100 using its own battery, I now had a working Steadicam.

 

 

 

Edited May 7, 2024 by Calum Tsang

[Calum Tsang]

Steadicam Training Videos

In the summer of 2022, I found myself sitting at a cottage (not my idea) in the midst of COVID, watching Youtube videos about how to operate a Steadicam.

The most clear and concise video is the original Steadicam SK training video:

Despite its age and the fact the original Steadicam SK is a single bone arm, I learned a lot from it. 

Another really key instructional video was the Steadicam EFP training tape:

Again, really helpful information.  What I didn't have at this cottage was the actual Steadicam rig, I was still repairing it.  I think that would have really helped to practice while watching these videos.

What really impressed me about these original videos was that they started with basic information, yet imparted expertise that many "beginner" YouTube videos don't.

You can see by the way the evolution of the components of Steadicam, if not from the design, the manufacturing and cost reduction over the years.  In the SK video, they go over the already simplified vest (that is missing the quick release rip cord functionality shown in the EFP video) and I could see how my Flyer vest was further cost reduced to remove parts while retaining the core functionality.

Edited May 9, 2024 by Calum Tsang

[Calum Tsang]

Vest Thumbscrews

One of the items that broke early on with my vest were the thumbscrews which lock the arm socket block in.   It wasn't from overtightening, I accidentally dropped part of the vest bracket onto the floor and the plastic arm of the screw took the blow.  Initially I had thought they were socket head cap screws with some sort of cover, so I actually tried to buy a SHCS, designed and printed a wing nut cap for it.  Sadly this was nowhere near strong enough.

Turns out that Shear-Loc makes these thumbscrews:

https://shear-loc.com/products/thumbscrews/

You can also order something very similar from McMaster Carr:

https://www.mcmaster.com/91185A925/

The ones that came with my Flyer look similar to the Shear-Loc ones.  They are 1/4" 20 thread.  Now that I have so many of them, I have ended up using them in my rig to secure batteries and other items.

Edited July 1, 2024 by Calum Tsang

[Bob Beresh]

More! More! More! More adventures of the Infrequent Flyer!

[Keith Wood]

Waiting for more -- I just got a grey-arm Flyer, still on its way, to replace the Pilot that I've been using.  I was looking for a better vest, and this deal popped up.  Tell us more, so that I can learn from your m/i/s/t/a/k/e/s experience.

I might keep the Pilot sled, which is set up the way I want, I'll decide that after it all arrives.

[Calum Tsang]

Wow! I haven't had a chance to post but here's some more--Glad to hear folks are thinking of ways of reviving old Pilots and Flyers!

First Live Operation Attempt (April 2023)

In the spring of 2023, I had an opportunity to use the Steadicam in a live environment.  I've been a volunteer with FIRST Robotics for about twenty years--they run student robot design competitions which are a mix of engineering challenge and live sporting event.  Students build fridge-sized robots which compete, six at at time, on a tennis court sized field, complete with emcees, announcers, and a broadcast crew, at about ten events over the spring.

Over the years they've built up a fairly extensive live broadcast operation which incorporates as many as ten cameras, with a mix of operator/tripod mounted, remote PTZ, and lipstick-type fixed cameras fed into a live webcast.   One new piece of equipment they started to play with in the fall of 2022 was a cheap battery powered wireless video transmitter, the Hollyland Mars 400 Pro, which works like a low cost Teradek.

I offered to try the Steadicam out there--in a strange, "this guy wants to come by with his weird science project"...kind of way.  Like that one person at your local church or alumni reunion who keeps offering to bring their prize-winning casserole recipe or suggesting they feature his avant-garde jazz trio.  In a big Rubbermaid tote, I brought out the whole system and we set it up with a the Hollyland transmitter running on a giant NP-F battery, the C100 on its own battery, and the Lilliput A7S monitor on the Ryobi drill battery.

We got the Hollyland receiver wired into the NewTek Tricaster switcher and with a Clearcom hanging off the vest, I was now wireless and free to roam the arena.  Off I went flying the camera around...

...that is until we realized the entire robot control field was crashing around us.  Turns out the robot control system uses regular Wi-Fi--each robot carries a generic Wi-Fi Internet router as its control radio.  The field controller arbitrates all the driver inputs and sends them over the air.  And it's all on the same channel as...you guessed it, the Hollyland transmitter/receiver.   It took about half an hour to figure out this snag--there was suddenly this giant interloper eating the entire 5GHz band 20Mhz channel the robot control system was on.  We moved the transmitter off onto its own channel and we were back in business.

Another complication was the wiring for the preview monitor--I needed to get the HDMI out of the C100 camera into both the monitor and the Hollyland transmitter.  Using the loop through port on the monitor, the Hollyland would identify the signal as 720x480, not as the full 1920x1080x60i we wanted.

At these events, I came to a few conclusions:

• You really need a C stand to set up and configure a Steadicam rig.  There really is no other way to do this--I tried using a Manfrotto superclamp on a fence and a big tripod, but you really can't fool around with the dock on anything but a C stand.
• I found the sled "getting away from me" as I operated, which I learned later was me not tuning the threads on the socket block correctly.
• The Steadicam can break the "180 degree rule" (the relative left/right positions of subjects in a scene) because it's not fixed in any given location.
• I really don't have enough time on the rig to be good at it. 

Either way, we got a few hours with the Steadicam on these events and it was a good learning opportunity.  The next projects would be to refine the lower sled and redesign the wiring to use a single power source, including the transmitter.

[Calum Tsang]

Lower Sled Redesign (Spring 2024)

The original Flyer sled has a pair of folding arms that flip out, one holding the preview monitor and the other with a paddle that the Anton Bauer mounts or NP1 style battery holders attach to.  I had originally designed the new battery fairing, which would capture the Ryobi battery's contacts and "stalk" upside down, and also house a DC to DC converter, to attach to that paddle.  However, I quickly realized this really wasn't ideal as the giant milled metal block didn't have many places to screw into and as a result the large mass of the battery was not well secured.  Also, I wasn't convinced the battery fairing was correctly positioned and I had no margin to adjust it if I found I needed to bring that mass closer to the axis of the post.

As a consumer of many random indie-film maker DSLR rig Youtube videos, I knew that there were lots of low cost 15mm rod components from vendors like SmallRig and the like--based around traditional cinema iris rod supports.    Earlier, I bought a "DSLR shoulder kit" to mount the C100 on the top of the Steadicam stage, which included a camera mounting block and a pair of 15mm rails.

To attach equipment onto these rails, including wireless transmitters, video splitter, and lav receiver, I ended up designing a "pedestal" that clamped onto the rails behind the camera and printed them:

This allows a module to be screwed on using one of those Shear-Loc thumbscrews through the center, or a Cheese Plate for things to be attached to.  I'm not convinced this is a good design as it doesn't give enough clamping pressure, but I'll probably revise it again later.

Now that I had a few of these rods to work with, I wanted to put the preview monitor on a pair of rails extending out forward, and the battery fairing extending out backwards.  Using rods seems to be common on the higher end Steadicam models as well as many home built Pilot and Flyer modifications, to trim the two major lower masses in and out for pan inertia, I think.

Using this standard with a pair of 15mm rods at 60mm wide meant I could buy cheap brackets and accessories for everything, other than the one interface to the Steadicam post.  For this, I designed a Sled Post block which holds two metal brackets--Smallrig 15mm Railblock Rod Clamps each which secure the pair of 15mm rods. 

The top of the block has a collar which clamps onto the Steadicam Flyer center post while the lower section has screw holes with counter sinks for the small short bolts that hold the rod clamps in place.  The clamp uses an embedded garden variety Home Depot hex nut with 1/4" 20 thread, to which a Shear-Loc thumbscrew is threaded onto to compress it.   One consideration I had was to design and orient the model on the print bed such that the forces from the loads, moment arms and bolts plus items in compression or tension were optimized.

This designed worked fairly well initially, but I found over time the part did crack as I did not design in an undercut under the clamping collar.  The lower base section is held in compliance by the metal Railblock Rod Clamp while the top tries to squeeze in, causing a crack.  I have since redesigned the part.

The next task would be to design a bracket for the preview monitor that used the 15mm/60mm rods out front, and to redesign the battery fairing to use the rods instead of the original Flyer paddle.

 

 

 

 

[Nelson Villamil]

Hi Calum

 

Great work, it's fun to do, yes, I know.

I've also been working on the Flyer ( modification for months ( I'm working "partial time" over that) , using carbon fiber rods for monitor and the battery,  new SDI 3G cable, BNC connectors, new power wires...

THANK YOU for your help printing the Gimbal Wrap  (version 1.0) . I'm also thinking about a version 2.0. (let me know if you cant help me about it.)

 

I'm almost finished with my modification; I'll share it here when I have a "clean" version, let say.

Don't forget analyze the distribution of the masses, to"reach" the  Dynamic Balance.

Just enjoy it