Since I bought my camcorder to allow others to experience the fun I have in my car (easy now), I've been getting a bit bored of the limitations in terms of viewpoints. I have a fixed mount that supports the camera to the left of my head, but haven't trusted exterior (sucker) mounts enough to use them with a £300 piece of electrotrickery. To a car programme, £300 isn't much to replace if the mount falls off and the camera's wrecked, but to me, £300 represents a lot of parts I could've bought for the car.
So, I wanted a better viewpoint to film from...but the camera's juuuust too tall to be mounted securely in one of the bumper light recesses in the bumper. As a result, I decided to go to the next-best option - the headlight.
Looking at it, I decided it would be easier to mount the camcorder inside a dismantled headlight, as opposed to making a mount that secured to the chassis, then mounting the camera to that. So, today, I picked up two headlights from the scrappy and some perspex (600mm x 300mm just in case!) with the aim of taking the glass out of the light, modifying it to take the camera, then making a perspex front to (a) protect the camera from stones and flies and (b) cut out the wind roar caused by wind blowing directly into the microphone.
Time for some pics!
I expected to have to smash the glass off the light, but some careful screwdriver tweaking saw it come off in one piece:
Checking to see how the light needed modifying to allow the camera to sit far enough back for the perspex not to come into contact with it, and to prevent having a vertical wall of perspex that would be noisy, and non-aerodynamic (pressing the perspex more than necessary, I wasn't concerned about slowing the car or increasing fuel consumption):
The back of the light carcass now sawn out to accommodate the battery pack, and allow the whole camera to be shunted back a couple of inches:
Sawing a perspex sheet to size (roughly), note the headlight moulding on the left protrudes a little, so to keep things simple, I cut the sheet shorter so it wouldn't interfere. The white colour is just from the two protective films:
A test-bend of an offcut. It's over five years since I worked with perspex, so I wanted to see how well it would bend using a heat gun and the vice as opposed to the correct tools. All went well
And the primary bend of the true lense:
A couple of tweaks to bring it into better contact with the top and bottom headlight edges so it can be fixed better:
And some shots of it back on the car (lense just taped in place for now, and camera bolted to the headlight shell):
The camera is very secure, though I'll use two small velcro squares to help even more. There may be quite a lot of vibration, and I'll need to tape over the open gaps at the sides of the lense, but I'll aim to take it out tomorrow for a test run. All the work in this thread took just over an hour, despite the number of photo's!
Not too big a job at all, and I think it'll look quite good!
