Telephoto Lens Tripod Mount

I bought this cheap 500mm/1000mm f/8 Manual Telephoto Lens to play around with but it didn’t balance so well on my tripod. It has a mount built onto the middle of the lens but when its attached to the camera and the tripod its was way off balance so it was hard to line up shots.

To fix this I designed this mount to change the center of gravity of the whole setup.

The lens can either be used as a 500mm or you can add a converter to it to use it as a 1000mm. When adding the converter though it changes the length and balance point so I designed the mount to have different tripod mounting points. The tripod mounting points are aluminum machined inserts.

Here are the two inserts from the bottom.

The mounting screws for the lens and camera are trimmed down bolts that I made into thumb screws.

The two mounting points are the exact center of gravity of the setup so it is a lot easier to alight shots when mounted to the tripod.

Unfortunately after all that work the lens was garbage (what did I expect for $80) and had a lot of speaks in dust spots so I ended up sending it back.

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